Just stunning, lush, sensual, lovely writing and engaging.

Good, but could be better. It sags in the middle and it lacks bit of edge, even bit of preposterousness than it has.

Besides, why does so much of British literature revolve around boarding-school experience?

One of the most disturbing books I've read in some time. Gripping, but disturbing. I don't know if I should recommend it or not... It is well written, but the subject material is shocking.

What...did I just read?

On the one hand, the protagonist is kind of rapey. So that's bad. On the other hand,

Spoiler

he gets eaten by a tiger

so maybe it evens out?

(THAT'S A JOKE. Not about the rapey part, but about it evening out.)

I um.

The first couple sections, with the guy as a kid/teenager, are pretty good. I agree it goes downhill from there.

A strange book - not perfect, but bewitching. The characters are so real, that it's easy to forgive apparent gaps (which may be due to my fast reading).

And I came to really love d'Aumout - a truly heroic character.

I came to think of Jean Marie as a real person - malleable, fallible, but above all, like Pepys, a product of the Enlightenment project of self knowledge and self improvement. His wisdom is as old as Socrates and as new as the emerging European nation state. "I've begun to believe that my life is like clay."
On the social commentary - he was also inevitably a creature of his time, who although sees peasants as people, also shrugs his shoulders when his tiger kills a gardener.
The sweep of history was grand and sublime, both in be rush of time and in the details.
I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Review to follow.

I ordered this from The Book Depository in order to read along with The Readers book club and it has not been released in the US yet. This is the first literary novel of a Science Fiction writer and it is wonderful! It takes place in the 18th Century in France and tells the life story of a nobleman, JeanMarie D'Aumont, concluding at the onset of the French Revolution. It describes in great detail many different flavors and foods that he tasted through his life as well as the odors of his fellow countrymen. Jonathan Grimwood writes beautifully and I really enjoyed and recommend this novel of historical fiction.

The beginning of the book caught me up in Jean-Marie's obsession with taste, but as the book progresses and he grows up, the world around him starts to fill out. In the end I was seeing the French revolution through the lesser nobility, which ends, obviously, with a banquet.

Actually 3;5 stars. A good book but too much strange sex scenes in it. The ending is terribly dramatic and unexpected.