Gluttony
The Seven Deadly Sins
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- USD 25.99
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- USD 25.99
Descripción editorial
In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between sin and virtue, overeating and self-control--a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony.
In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius's Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness--it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size.
"The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been--and continues to be--the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.
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Originally a lecture in the New York Public Library's Seven Deadly Sins series, this erudite little meditation on appetite and religion matches ancient and medieval texts (Petronius, St. John Chrysostom) with up-to-date references to stomach stapling and Saveur. A confident satirist and stylist, Prose (Blue Angel, etc.) avows her bafflement at the idea of sinful eating and glosses the intervening early modern and postindustrial periods as too contentedly gluttonous what else is capitalism but the desire for more? to bother about. Instead she focuses on the morality of the Church, which condemned gluttony in its various forms as an offense against, or at least an obstacle to, godliness. This approach she contrasts with the current ambivalence about food consumption, which extols gastronomic luxury while condemning fat and self-indulgence. Desire for food (rather than the mere need of it) forges a link between body and spirit that seems both inevitable and dangerous: "the wages of sin have changed, and now involve a version of hell on earth: the pity, contempt and distaste of one's fellow mortals." Sauntering through various texts, Prose offers up a wonderful smorgasbord of factoids and aper us, whose chief ingredient is irony. Thus, the religious culture that regards gluttony as a willful sin but must allow even sinners to eat; the medical culture that calls overeating a blameless compulsion, even as it exhorts us to eat sensible diets. She ends in the modern sphere, commenting astutely on the newest (and most ironic) equation of fat with money, whereby profit is derived from the accumulation and loss of other people's weight. A chapter on celebrations of gluttony, from Fielding to M.F.K. Fisher, closes this stimulating, pointedly dispassionate investigation of a decidedly emotional subject.