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Original Title:	The Epicure's Lament
ISBN:	038572098X (ISBN13: 9780385720984)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Hugo Whittier

The Epicure's Lament

Kate Christensen

Paperback | Pages: 351 pages

Rating: 3.73 | 1304 Users | 210 Reviews

Narrative Concering Books The Epicure's Lament

For ten years, Hugo Whittier, upper-class scion, former gigolo, failed belle lettriste, has been living a hermit's existence at Waverly, his family's crumbling mansion overlooking the Hudson. He passes the time reading Montaigne and M. F. K. Fisher, cooking himself delicious meals, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and nursing a grudge against the world. But his older brother, Dennis, has returned, in retreat from an unhappy marriage, and so has his estranged wife, Sonia, and their (she claims) daughter Bellatrix, shattering Hugo's cherished solitude. He's also been told by a doctor that he has the rare Buerger's disease, which means that unless he stops smoking, he will die—all the more reason for Hugo to light up, because his quarrel with life is bitter and an early death is a most attractive prospect.

As Hugo smokes and cooks and sexually schemes and pokes his perverse nose into other people's marriages and business, he records these events as well as his mordant, funny, gorgeously articulated personal history and his thoughts on life and mortality in a series of notebooks. His is one of the most perversely compelling literary personalities to inhabit a novel since John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure, and his ancestors include the divinely cracked and eloquent narrators of the works of Nabokov. As snobbish and dislikable as Hugo is, his worldview is so seductively conveyed that even the most resistant readers will be put under his spell. His insinuating voice gets into their heads and under their skin in the most seductive way. And as he prepares what may be his final Christmas feast for family and friends, readers will have to ask, "Isthis the end of Hugo?"

Imagine the book the young hero of the independent film hit Igby Goes Down might write twenty-five years from now, and you'll get an idea of the powerfully peculiar charm of The Epicure's Lament.

Details Epithetical Books The Epicure's Lament

Title	:	The Epicure's Lament
Author	:	Kate Christensen
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 351 pages
Published	:	January 25th 2005 by Anchor (first published February 17th 2004)
Categories	:	Fiction. Food and Drink. Food. Literary Fiction. Contemporary. Literature. Novels

Rating Epithetical Books The Epicure's Lament

Ratings: 3.73 From 1304 Users | 210 Reviews

Commentary Epithetical Books The Epicure's Lament

The character of Hugo Whittier has to be one of the great fictional creations, a real nasty piece of work but still strangely likeable. He's a forty-year-old failed poet and essayist whose life gave him enough ill turns--a lousy childhood, a cheating wife--that he's closed himself up in the family estate and decided to smoke himself to death. He loves Montaigne, M.F.K. Fisher, cooking, eating, and sex, but not enough to stay around.When his older brother, a solid, duty-bound type thrown into a

So great. This book was hilarious and dark and bitter and in parts so so wrong. I loved it! There were sentences that were so perfect that I had to re-read them and share them aloud. Part of me secretly wishes I could be more like Hugo: brutally honest, crusty, self-indulgent and totally not care what other people think of me. I had a very slight problem was the ending, which I won't spoil. I was hoping it would turn out differently, left up to the imagination and not as optimistic--perhaps

Tara recommended this to me, being a fellow epicure and snark-dispenser, and I am glad she did.I know Hugo is supposed to be a pretentious, curmudgeonly anti-hero, but he's a hero to me: all he wants is great food, great reading, organization, sex, and solitude, with a bit of shit-disturbing thrown in for good measure. (He's an angry Frasier Crane.) Then various interlopers intrude on his (apparent) final days, meddling and muddling up his business. LET HIM EAT HIS BROCCOLI RABE IN PEACE,

As with most 5-star books, it's hard to articulate why I loved this so, so much (just realized my 5-star reviews are the most moronic). There is something about Hugo that is so starkly, unhypocritically human that I felt so much pathos for him as protagonist and not anti-hero. Christensen conveyed his voice almost perfectly. There were a couple moments where I thought his better angels were winning in an unrealistic fashion, but then I realized that human nature also means becoming invested in

not my thing.

More like the lamentable epicurean. Strangely enough, the recipes were dull compared to the dazzling observations of all manner of human failings, great revenge sex scenes and an original setting. This book almost made me miss smoking cigarettes. Well done.

This book was hilarious. Steeped in gallows humor, Hugo Whittier sneers his way through life, a hedonistic curmudgeon who charmingly attempts to seduce nearly every woman who crosses his path, all while drinking and smoking himself into oblivion. He truly is the definition of someone who DGAF, and his complete unwillingness to censor himself, his biting wit, or his unyielding misanthropy, makes him a remarkable and memorable character.Leaving my corpse for others to dispose of, struck me then