A Carnivore's Inquiry: A Novel [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Sabina Murray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2004

When we meet Katherine, the winning-and rather disturbing-twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore's Inquiry, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. Katherine's occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she begins journeying from literary New York to rural Maine and Mexico City, trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history. The story races toward a hair-raising conclusion, while Katherine, and the reader, close in on the reasons for both her and her mother's fascination with aberrant, violent behavior. This is a novel of ideas, a shocking and enlightening modern Gothic, and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose reminiscent of Patrick McGrath or Angela Carter, A Carnivore's Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

That 23-year-old Katherine Shea is an unreliable narrator is evident from the first pages of Murray's mesmerizing new novel (after the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning story collection, The Caprices). As she describes the way she picks up hapless author Boris Naryshkin on the Manhattan subway, coolly manipulates and moves in with him, drains him of money and sleeps with other men, Katherine's lack of conscience and absence of affect obviously go beyond neurotic and into psychotic territory. Yet she is intelligent and witty in her solipsistic explanation of her needs and behavior, even as she hints at the manifestations of her mother's insanity and reveals the margins of her own unstable personality. Her fascination with cannibalism, and her deep familiarity with its depiction in art (Goya, Gericault), literature (Dante, Poe, Melville), folklore (Hansel and Gretel, the Tale of Bisclaveret) and history (the Donner Party, the voyage of the Essex) is revealed in tandem with the events of a journey that takes her across the country from New York to Mexico, with crucial scenes played out in a cottage in Maine. Katherine's hegira becomes increasingly sinister, and Murray paces her psychological thriller with consummate control, keeping the reader enthralled through subtle suggestion and a scattering of grisly details. But the author has a darker purpose. More than the story of one deranged woman's obsession, the novel and its brilliant subtext hint at the ways American society devours the weak, while building a case for a blood hunger in human nature. The tension of the last chapter is followed by a grim suspicion; the reader will go back to the first pages to confirm the worst.
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From Booklist

Pursuit of the flesh reaches prickly proportions in this seductive thriller by PEN/Faulkner-winner Murray. After a year spent in Italy, 23-year-old free spirit Katherine Shea returns to the U.S and begins an affair with Boris, an unremarkable, middle-aged Russian novelist. Restless within the relationship, Katherine ventures out on her own, encountering two men who meet violent ends: one, the victim of a serial killer who bit a chunk out of his prey's cheek; the other, savaged by a coyote as he slept in his truck. Intrigued and disturbed by the slayings, Katherine begins to ponder cannibalism in literature and art, from the rapacious Count Ugolino in Dante's Inferno to the bloody tale behind Romantic painter Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. The string of murders continues, revealing the truth--and consequences--of Katherine's preoccupation with the perverse. "Were we not all cannibals," she asks, "dispensing with the defenseless, concerned only with our own survival?" Not for the easily queasy, this is a dark meditation on the vagaries that dwell beneath civilization's veneer. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (June 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117694
• ASIN: B001G8WMEM
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,801,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars DARK AND DRAMATIC- BOTH THE STORY AND THE READING, September 20, 2004

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Carnivore's Inquiry: A Novel (Hardcover)

Dramatic, dark, disturbing - all describe this tale by Pen/Faulkner Award winner Sabina Murray. Stage, television, and film actress Wendy Hoopes gives articulate voice to 23-year-old narrator Katherine Shea.

Apparently lacking any form of moral compunction Katherine first befriends and then cohabits with Boris, an older Russian novelist. She hasn't wasted a great deal of time as she has only recently arrived in New York City from Italy. We already know that this gal is not one for settling down, what we have not yet discovered is that her taste for new adventure may border on the psychotic.

Her time with Boris is brief. She's soon seeking the company of other men and other places as she crosses the country and winds up in Mexico. She leaves in her wake a trail of dead bodies. Katherine's interests become increasingly macabre as she begins to research cannibalism wherever she may find it - in art, literature, research.

Why is this young woman so transfixed by behavior that repulses most? Listen as her story races to an astounding conclusion.

- Gail Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly dark and consuming, August 22, 2007

By 

D. Enochson "Just a person" (Dallas Tx) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Carnivore's Inquiry: A Novel (Hardcover)

I love this book. I've read it three times and I just bought another copy for a gift. It has everything I love in a novel. It's fantastically engrossing and the main character is so charming and bizarre. So many novels give away all the answers too early. These characters are as unpredictable as real people. The historical references are intriguing and cringe inducing. Every character has depth and motivation. You are equally fascinated and repulsed on every page. Each time I read it I am just as impressed by the writing and tantalized by the plot. I can't wait to read other books by this author.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but could have been better, August 15, 2004

By 

Seth_Saoirse (Jacksonville,FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Carnivore's Inquiry: A Novel (Hardcover)

I thought I would like this book more than I did, and I was disappointed. While Katherine Shea is a strong narrator with a penchant for describing the macabre. It's interesting but becomes too convoluted,despite this I liked her character and her often cutting insight into those around her..it was the plot that left a great deal to be desired.

We already know that something is "not quite right" with Katherine but any reader could see what was coming from a mile away, and it was the thought, that this was going to end differently or unexpectedly attracted me to the story. A Carnivore's Inquiry is a good book but I hope to see better in the future from such a talented author.