I tried to listen to this and just found my mind drifting and i wasn't really listening to it, it didn't hold my attention. I think if i read this as a physical book i would probably enjoy it more.

Absolutely no eating when reading this one. I definitely had to pause my audiobook while preparing food, and I’m not queasy. Since Tarrare was quite the tumblr phenomenon back in the day (Tarrare girlies out there, you know who you are), I was vaguely familiar with the historical figure and only did a quick Wikipedia read before starting into The Glutton.

With that revision in mind and my memories refreshed, I’m afraid the novelization of Tarrare’s life story didn’t add much to the Wikipedia article on the person. While in part beautifully written (and in part a gruesome, ugly account of Tarrare’s worst moments), and successfully giving especially young Tarrare more of a background story and motivation, the later events of his life weren’t exactly reinvented by A.K. Blakemore.

This is not a book to read on a bad day.

And now it's time for me to take a break from literary fiction.

This is an unusual story; part myth retelling, part historical fiction, with a biographical feel.
Tarare is a person of insatiable appetite, born into poverty in rural France. He’s a sweet, naive boy with a gentle nature, who’s soon taken advantage of and the consequence of this loss of innocence is a hunger that can never be satisfied. This becomes another means by which the world takes advantage of him. He’s not an unsympathetic character, but neither is he relatable. He’s a victim of his circumstances but lacks the strength and mental ability to forge a pathway out of misfortune, and so his life ambles along from one distasteful (no pun intended) drama to the next.
I listened to the audio book, with thanks to NetGalley and Bolinda Audio for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

This tale was intriguing, but the second timeline that stopped part-way through confused me and my interest waned while listening to the audiobook. It's obviously well researched and Tarare is an interesting character, but overall it was too bleak for me personally. Worth reading if the subject is one that will interest you.

Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, Tarare, is dying after eating a golden fork. It is not the strangest thing he has eaten, but it is turning out to be the deadliest. As he lies in the hospital, he tells his story, from his childhood to his near death, after which he never felt full again. And as he is taken advantage of by those around him, Tarara has gone to extreme lengths to try and sate his hunger.

I really enjoyed this audiobook. I liked the insight into French history but mostly just found Tarare’s story incredibly interesting to listen to. I will be honest, the story lost me a little in the middle where I just didn’t have any clue what was happening for a bit but it got me back pretty quickly. I found it an interesting story but also an unusual concept and beautiful writing that kept me hooked.

I can’t wait to read AK Blakemore’s other book - The Manningtree Witches - and really recommend The Glutton for an interesting and unusual story.

I'm not truly sure I understood this but it was wild and I absolutely loved it. So weird! Also I really enjoyed the performance on the audiobook. Bravo

The glutton is a delightfully sinister tale, better read on audiobook. Seriously people, you are missing out if you aren't giving the audiobook a chance! The narration of this makes the book further more melancholic and adds to the story so much. A story that makes the perfect fall read, with is dark, gritty aesthetics. Tarare as a character is so complex and well developed I simply couldn't put the book down, and just had to keep on reading with him. Devoured (haha) this in one sitting. Absolutely recommend.

The story of Tarare was a sad and hard one to listen, but unforgettable. It was only made better by the great quality of the narrator. Highly recommend this one! Thanks to NetGalley, the editor and the author for the opportunity to access this copy.

A haunting book that wallows in the contrast of the beautiful and the disgusting. But I think it's the sense of loneliness and sadness that will stay with me. Blakemore depicts a world of ingrained pain and cruelty; the expectation of those things has become their own response. In place of sympathy or love, there is only disdain and frustration. There is no mechanism for comfort in Tarare's world; hunger is the synecdoche for his pain, and it is a pain that his world will not salve.

I was sent the ARC Audiobook from NetGalley and BolindaAudio in exchange for an honest review.

What an interesting and atmospheric premise.
In the late 18th century of France, the story begins in a hospital. The Nuns taking care of the patients there have been warned about a certain patient. This patient must always be watched. But how would you feel hearing the rumors of the patient's monstrous deeds to satisfy their insatiable hunger?

I felt really pulled in from the start, I was at the edge of my seat for the start of this story.
The writing was written lyrically well with a flowing turn of phrase throughout.
The character's personalities shone through and gave them quite a bit of depth, though Tarare's character showed such complexity 0and had that extra layer to them that really made them stand out.

Overall, I found this read to be enjoyable. However, some places in the story seemed to drag a little bit, and so I would find myself zoning out at times, having to rewind and relisten to the audibook. Don't get me wrong, I really like the choice in Narrator and found they brought the story and characters to life quite well

In the end, I wish I could have rated the book higher, but wouldn't be able to justify myself doing so when I found myself zoning out and wishing how the story was a bit more fast paced.

The Glutton is a slow-paced literary historical novel about the demise of Tarare, and how him eating a fork led to him dying in a hospital. In the afterword, A.K. Blakemore actually mentions that Tarare's story is based on actual myths, which was really interesting to know and I think she had a very interesting take on the story. It's definitely not a book for anyone the faint-hearted, as there's a lot of gross parts, bawdy jokes and uncomfortable references. Tarare's story is quite a sad one, as even though you're rooting for him to make something more of himself, there is always something to remind you that he is not taken seriously by others. This book would definitely appeal to those that are fans of Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh and Perfume by Patrick Suskind.
The audio narration was expertly done by Phillipe Spall, who does a great job of providing a dynamic narration that sucks you into the story and brings the characters alive.

Thank You for the book, Bolinda.

The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore is a strange book. It is set in France in the 1700s and is the story of a peasant boy who was always hungry and could eat just about anything. It is based on popular French myth, I think. This book had parts where you felt sorry for the boy and at times when you abhorred him. All I can say is that it is a complicated book but definitely worth listening to.

So, do give it a go. It's very different from your usual books.

Set in France around 1798 - year 7 of the republican calendar. This is a dramatic retelling of a true story, that of The Great Tarare, glutton and showman. The tale builds a sickening sympathy with Tarare, who has been through a terrible upbringing of poverty and death, and a lifetime treated as a freak in revolutionary France. With an unending hunger he will do almost anything to quench this urge to eat, most likely brought on by a violent attack as a child.

The writing style makes the graphic content almost poetic, with an immersive narrative style pulling you into his history. The characters are believable and well rounded, you can imagine the group of misfits and vagabonds travelling together across a destitute France; Torturous doctors gleefully testing the boundaries of Tarare. This book is intriguing, visceral and foremost saddening.

My only gripe is that it could have been edited down a little to be more concise. Overall a really excellent listen, if you are unsure then it is definitely worth a listen.

The narrator is just perfect for this book and really adds to this adaptation with excellent accents and character voicing.

The Glutton is a captivating novel following the life of Tarare as he grows up in pre-revolutionary France. Blakemore's writing immerses you into the desperate life of Tarare who leads an existence of ridicule and neglect - born out of wedlock and subject to humiliation at the hands of his peers and his mother's various lovers. As the story unfolds in flashback from his deathbed, Tarare is seen in a sympathetic light which is in contrast to the description of his gluttonies.

Full of unforgettable characters, the life of Tarare and the story of his 'greatness' will live long in the memory aided by the excellent sensitive narration by Philippe Spall .

How good it is to be back in the realm of A. K. Blakemore! It seems to've been such a long time since 'The Manningtree Witches', which was a standout book of 2021 for me.

Based upon the true story of a French peasant of around 1772 (Tarare, the glutton), the facts of whose life were conveyed to the world in an 1804 memoir in a medical journal following the patient's death, the peripatetic adventurings of Blakemore’s protagonist reminded me of those of Drosselmeier in Gregory Maguire’s ‘Hidensee: a Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker’. The narrative vehicle of prison-cell confession employed in Part One and Part Two of ‘The Glutton’ calls back to ‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell, whereas the breadth and depth made apparent in the text of Blakemore's historical research into eighteenth-century France has something of the flavour of Nell Stevens’ 2022 masterpiece ‘Briefly, a Delicious Life’. And while other reviewers will doubtless report in greater detail upon the plot and structure of A. K. Blakemore’s new novel, I would like here to extol just a few aspects of her own inimitable style and technique, which make ‘The Glutton’ like no other novel.

Blakemore’s figurative language in ‘The Glutton’ is characterised by inelaborate, yet elegant adjectives: 'diminished grace'; 'fretted silver'; 'pearly wounds'; 'sotted, vaunting farm boys'. And when she calls upon metaphors and similes, they are direct and indisputable: 'old, beaked women'; 'his vertebrae press against the freckled skin of his back like the seam of a bean'; 'the dry peppercorn eyes of a dead rat'. By means of these, coupled with a deceptively effortless language structure composed of short phrases, rhetorical questions and direct address by the author, pauses, repetition, and accumulating lists of three, Blakemore affects a kind of mesmerism upon her reader.

Once mesmerised thus, I found myself ultimately unmade by Blakemore's imagery: 'The rising sun is at his back, shellacking the low cloud in carcinomic pinks and tentative oranges. All around him the trees droop, fetid with the late rain, and the hedgerows fill with lively music: crickets, calling birds.'

Using imagery, Blakemore artfully marries literary substance and literary effect. Whether imagery is there to allure, to impress, to make readers keep reading, or - like here - more skilfully, to bring readers reflexively back to a pictorial expression of the tokens of eating, for example: the mouth, the belly, the substance of food (bean, broth, skin, fat), this is Literary Fiction at its best:

'Saint Jean Baptiste was born of Elizabeth, cousin of the Holy Virgin, Tarare remembers this. The Virgin went to visit with Elizabeth when they were both with child and, greeting one another with a kiss, they felt their swollen bellies quiver with the miracles that the Lord had planted in each of them. Saint Jean knew the Lord was close, even then, the Saviour of mankind curled blind as a bean in amniotic broth, beneath the skin and fat of a virgin girl.'

In the audiobook edition, Phillipe Spall transmutes into music Blakemore’s intentness with regard to the rhythm of her language; the measure of downbeats and upbeats: ‘sets out in a shambling jog’ bears a regular pattern of emphases and theses. ‘There is no maybe about dead’ demonstrates the same rhythmic beats. Spall salutes the pacing of the text and gives voice to these metrical notes in a sensitive manner. Consider the stressed and unstressed syllables in the line: ‘where wolves could talk and sometimes wore hats’. Exquisite! ‘They don’t know how to handle bayonets’ is a flawless line of iambic pentameter. If, as Blakemore states in the Afterword to the text, her intent is 'not to present a truth, but offer the most compelling, and therefore believable iteration of a myth', then her application of linguistic meter is apt; it accords with her mythopoeiaic intention. Rhythmic language is nursery-rhyme language, folk tale language, it is the medium by which we learn our fables, traditions, our allegories. So becomes The Great Tarare, the Glutton of Lyon. To this end, Spall’s narration engages his breath, modulates his volume (to almost a whisper whilst Sister Perpetué hears Tarare’s ‘confession’, for example), and pays meticulous attention to punctuation to unlock the poetic meter in Blakemore’s phrasing.

I was transported by ‘The Glutton’. Consider the following quote, which I think demonstrates the lure of Blakemore’s language, which held me so in thrall to the novel:

‘The sky is whitening. The birds begin their fractal chorus, delicate in its thousand component parts: a grass-coloured woodpecker, a lovely blackbird. It would do no good to describe Tarare’s pain, which is enormous and in every part of his body, because in pain we are all alone, latched into the flesh, where the blood whistles and cells knit and unknit themselves. To tell you that the pain fills him like a heavy fire all over his young body would be feeble and perhaps ultimately deceitful. To tell you he tries to open his eyes and finds they will not open would be to pick your pockets of a truth you are likely already in possession of and perhaps, wish to forget: that in our suffering, we are all of us totally, irrevocably alone. To describe the vignettes that play out behind his swollen eyes: the screeching of hideous marionettes illuminated by a flat red glare, his mother weeping by the hearth, the robbers counting up their money with frilled whores in their laps, a mere sideshow.’

A. K. Blakemore’s reiterative style, where she brings her reader back again and again to the being within the flesh and blood of a body (through which and for which Tarare gluts himself), is drawn to a close in the novel’s final words, pulled from a description of the afterlife given by a spirit manifestation to the Cercle Harmonique: 'All is perfect and delicious'. I’d extend the same nomination to ‘The Glutton’: perfect; delicious. My sincere thanks to Bolinda Audio for the opportunity to review a digital audio copy via NetGalley. (Citations are subject to change. Any errors in transcribing quotes rest with me.)

This was my first A.K. Blakemore novel but it won't be my last. All I can say is that The Glutton is one of my favourite books of the year. A tragic but beautiful tale that I literally couldn't put down and still thinking of and recommending to anyone and everyone.

I would also recommend both the book and audiobook as the narrator was wonderful and really brought the novel to life.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

🎧Audio Book Review🎧

The Glutton
AK Blakemore

🌟🌟🌟🌟

I honestly don't know what to say about this book as in as much as I was disgusted in places, finding it hard to stomach (forgive the pun!) - I was totally and utterly compelled to keep switching it on and reading!

This tells the story of The Great Tarare - the boy, the man, the peasant and The Glutton.
This was based on the stories of old, of a french peasant who literally could not stop eating.

We are introduced to the present day Tarare, chained to a hospice bed and watched day and night by the nuns attending him.
Known and feared by all, we are already put on edge wondering what on earth this frail old man has done.

Over the course of the book, we are taken on a journey through the depths of a Revolution era France, following Tarare's journey from innocent, young boy to the bottomless man freakshow he became.

This was a tough read for many reasons - the vivid descriptions of the period both disgust and fascinate.
A time we've all heard lots about in terms of the politics and royalty, but following a peasant's story really dragged us through the depths of society at its lowest.

I felt really sorry for Tarare. Born into this, he was abused and taken advantage of for his whole life. Others created him and his persona and others feared this, isolating him even further.

I absolutely loved our narrator!
His voice was in such contrast to the words being read.
All the disgust, all the horror of the storyline told with such a calm, soft voice, almost musical in its delivery. Absolute perfection.

I can't say I loved this one - but I was obsessed by it and found that I couldn't put it down!




💕Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for my ARC copy - this is my honest review 💕

Fair warning “The Glutton” is not for anyone with a weak stomach and there are triggers galore so please check for content warnings.

This book is a fictionalised retelling in a sense of the life of the Great Tarare or Tararre, a human turned sideshow exhibit with an insatiable hunger who is compelled to eat and eat he does- from rats and offal to live snakes and more. (I read somewhere that live snakes were his favourite!)

This is not an easy read I felt sympathy for Tarare as we learn of his childhood and experiences but also I felt so much revulsion for him- everything in this story is disconcerting it’s bleak and brutal and just done so well!

This is a book about Hunger - literal hunger but also the depths that people will go to when they hunger for more. The turmoil of the time is palpable as we join Tarare as he journey’s through France at the time of the Revolution.

I read so much of this book with curled toes or through my fingers and yet this book is utterly beautiful! The writing style is poetic and lyrical and it takes some getting used to I got straight into “The Glutton” but that was because I had read AK Blakemore’s previous book “The Manningtree Witches.” Stick with it because it’s worth it.

The audiobook was fantastic, I felt the performance was every bit in keeping with the story.

This is a book that will stay with me for some time- I can’t wait to see what A K Blakemore brings us next.

A fictionalisation of the life of The Great Tarare, showman, soldier and polyphagous glutton.

Set predominantly in revolutionary France and rich with gothic atmosphere in the vein of Perfume by Patrick Süskind, The Glutton is a disquieting read.

Blakemore has a breathtaking lexicon which here she reins in just enough to prevent distraction from the narrative. Her characterisation of Tarare and his world is sympathetic and vivid.

The audiobook narrated by Philippe Spall furnishes Tarare with a mellifluous voice which contrasts perfectly with the horror of his deeds.

My thanks to NetGalley and Bolinda Audio for the audio-ARC.

This was snooze fest. I have to admit that I don’t even know why I thought I would like this one, maybe because it’s set in my country? But unfortunately I just couldn’t care, like at all, about anything happening in this book. I think that the fact that I listened to the audiobook really did not help because my mind kept wandering and I would not listen for some small part of it. Nonetheless I liked the narrator, I don’t know if he’s french but if he isn't he has the best accent I’ve ever listened to.
I find that I cannot remember most of it anymore, not even a few days later. However, the writing was really enjoyable and I think that I will, eventually, pick up the author’s other books.
I would rate this one two stars if it wasn't for the amazing narration.