The Theoretical Foot
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
An undiscovered novel by an iconic American food writer – the publication of this enchanting portrait of 1930s bohemian life will be a major literary event
'I sank into The Theoretical Foot like a fat strawberry into whipped cream ... Intimate and moral, funny and wise, there is something incantatory about her style ... She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop' Rachel Cooke, Observer
Susan Harper and Joe Kelly, in love and hitchhiking through Europe, never want this perfect, passionate summer to end. It is the late 1930s, and society frowns on the slack morals of couples living in sin. But these tiresome strictures are swept away when they arrive at La Prairie, the elegant haven on Lake Geneva where Joe's enigmatic friend Sara and her lover Tim preside – where judgement is suspended and time ebbs deliciously away.
Surrounded by orchards heavy with plums and meadows splashed with poppies, lunches are long, youth is languorous and wine flows. As morning gives way to afternoon and sunset brings the evening's festivities, the unseen tensions and desires of the group are revealed, the fleeting yearnings and long-held resentments.
A long lost gem by one of the twentieth century's most iconic food writers, this previously unpublished novel illuminates moral attitudes in the 1930s and shows glimpses of a refugee-filled Europe blighted by the rise of Fascism and the menace of another war. Enchanting, light, yet suffused with the darkness of what is to come, The Theoretical Foot is a witty and bold portrait of a bohemian life under threat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The legendary and incantatory powers of description that earned Fisher (The Gastronomical Me) her fame as one of the 20th century's best prose writers are fully at work in this intricate novel, the discovery of which is almost as romantic a story as the couple at its center (the book was never published in her lifetime and was found in her late agent's effects in 2012). In late August 1938, an unmarried American couple, Tim Garton and Sara Porter, welcome to their lovely Swiss estate of La Prairie a number of expatriates. Their troubles, heartbreaks, worries, and triumphs coalesce around a party that, like the gathering war in the background, acquires undercurrents of tragedy. While points of view alternate among Sara's brother, Dan, and sister, Honor; Tim's literary sister, Nan, and her companion, Lucy; and the young lovers Joe and Susan all of whom are trying to escape some spell of love the contrapuntal vignettes of an anonymous man suffering agonies from an amputated leg make the wistful longings of the other characters seem dreamy by comparison. Tim and Sara are the steady, sphinx-like, yet essential pair, loosely based on Fisher and the "one true love" of her own life, who hold the others in orbit about them. Readers longing for the clever banter of Hemingway's characters or the indolent gloss of a Fitzgerald story will adore the book's modernist style, in which the action focuses on each passing thought, each turn of emotion, each detail of drink or cigarette with an extraordinary attention that makes the ordinary seem simultaneously bewildering, mysterious, and absurd. This is a worthy addition to the Fisher canon.
