Sweetbitter
A novel
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3,5 • 2 notes
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- 6,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A thrilling novel of the senses and a coming-of-age tale, following a small-town girl into the electrifying world of New York City and the education of a lifetime at one of the most exclusive restaurants in Manhattan. • "Brilliantly written.... Outstanding." —The New York Times Book Review
Newly arrived in New York City, twenty-two-year-old Tess lands a job working front of house at a celebrated downtown restaurant. What follows is her education: in champagne and cocaine, love and lust, dive bars and fine dining rooms, as she learns to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing life she has chosen.
The story of a young woman’s coming-of-age, set against the glitzy, grimy backdrop of New York’s most elite restaurants, in Sweetbitter Stephanie Danler deftly conjures the nonstop and high-adrenaline world of the food industry and evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, and the fragility and brutality of being young and adrift.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut is a quintessential coming-of-age story set in a remorseless, unusual city. Time and place are superbly established: the setting is the behind-the-scenes milieu of a celebrated restaurant in 2006 Manhattan. Propelled by "unbridled, unfocused desire" but still essentially naive, 22-year-old Tess has fled an empty life in the Midwest and landed a coveted job as a server in a restaurant that strongly resembles the famous Union Square Caf . At first crushingly lonely and exhausted by the arduous routine, Tess is mentored by longtime senior server Simone. Despite warnings to avoid falling for bartender Jake, and willfully blind to the strange relationship between Jake and Simone, Tess begins a passionate affair with him. Meanwhile, she becomes an accepted member of a select society of overworked, terminally tense and bone-tired wait staff. Danler writes about food with sensory gusto as Tess learns how to distinguish the fine points of every wine, how to identify an heirloom tomato or oyster, how to shave a truffle. Tess also learns how to get seriously drunk and snort lines of coke. Early on, she defines the foods and condiments that are sweet and those that are bitter and her relationships with Simone and Jake are ultimately just that: a sweet time of consummate happiness followed by bitter betrayal. Throughout, Danler evokes Tess's voice intimate, confiding, wonderstruck, depressed with deft skill. This novel is a treat, sure to find a big following.
Avis d’utilisateurs
Sweetbitter
I loved this book although it left a sense of unachievement, of things left unsaid (maybe too autobiographical?), of à wrong ending. (for me, until the very last pages, Tess was the winner, but she is not. The winner is not the young, pretty, promising heroine with a quick sense of learning everything that comes her way : "gastronomie à la française", wine history and wine tasting, friendship, Love, but also (with too much emphasis) sex and drugs. The winner is her would be influent older friend Simone, the deus ex machina who manages to deprive her of her lover and have her fired at the same time.
Although the two girls can be seen as the only "round characters" (see Forster's Aspects of the novel"), New York (with some poetic passages) and the world of huge restaurants run as big companies unlike anywhere else, are characters in their own right. Let's sum up and agree : a very promising novel.DG from France