Customer Reviews

Carnivore's Inquiry

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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

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 The historical references are intriguing and cringe inducing.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.

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.

This novel employs weak and/or untenable character motivation to carry a ridiculous plot that presents itself as a "novel of ideas" but is in reality a pastiche of solipsistic ramblings and cullings from secondary sources. As a novel of suspence, the narrative leaves loose ends and holes at nearly every turn, and the closure is so tepid I couldn't believe the diting could be so careless--one is led to think this "plot" is leading up to a climax, when instead what we get isn't even anticlimactic.

I had this book on my shelf for a while before I cracked it open, knowing nothing about it except the synopsis on the back and that it came recomended from another book. The author goes into slight tangents of historical events -- at the beginning it seems pointless. After a while, you understand all the links, and begin to become very interested in this character that is much like many careless intellectual college drop outs who never found it fullfilling and always found themselves bound by the system. Maybe I liked it because I identified with her -- almost too much -- even though she is far richer and always seeking to put herself in a situation most level headed people wouldn't. That's what makes her facinating. In hind sight, I can see why many people didn't like it, but reading it, I was devoured by her smart writing style and the storyline. Not until 3/4ths into the book you suspect anything out of the ordinary. Suspensful, definately. The last chapter was kind of anticlimactic.

The cover blurb made this book sound amazing; if only it were as complex and fulfilling as it sounded. The book is very dependent upon Katherine's character, yet she simply didn't mesh for me. She didn't come off as dangerous or interesting; she sounded more like any immature, impulsive, hard-drinking twenty-two-year-old. And the plot seemed bogged down in a "Groundhog Day" scenario, the same scene happening over and over. There were snippets here and there that showcased talented writing; I agree w/ the other reviewer that Sabina Murray seems more suited to short stories. Over all, the book seemed poorly edited, with no real cohesion or feeling that the plot was moving forward.

If you are looking for a gross-out gore book - look elsewhere. That isn't where this book is coming from. The book blurb states that the author is a professor of Fine Art, and I think that that is the kind of audience that this book is aimed at. It contains lots of sidebars off into literature, art history and American history, all of the dark and grisly kind. Which makes this book an intellectual investigation into madness, both in art, and unfortunately to some of the characters in this book, in life as well. That component of the book is brilliantly done.

I was also very struck by the narrators' personality - although I do not think that I would want to date her! I agree with the reviewer that wonders why a character has to be "likable" to be interesting. I found the narrator to be absolutely riveting. And I loved the relationship between her and her mother. The mother was quite a riveting character herself. And as the book comes to the end, we see that the father is more than the family square and unfeeling autocrat that his role would seem to be. Which all turns this book into a very strange and interesting riff about family inheritances, predilections, and duties, all stretched to their most gothic extremes. I found this family dynamic to be brilliantly done as well.

Bravo.

I don't understand why someone believes that an "unlikable" heroine equals an unlikable book. It isn't critquing the work or valid criticism; it is instead an oversimplified and childish approach to literature. Such readers would probably dismiss "King Lear" as too depressing and therefore not worth reading. Murray's novel is a dark and brilliant treatise on cannabalism disguised as an equally dark and brilliant novel about a young woman's search for identity. I found Katherine, in fact, to be a deeply empathetic character. Who hasn't gone through a part of their life feeling aliented and alone, certain every relationship will end badly? Most of the reviews of this novel dwell on the question of whether or not Katherine is a likable charcter. It is a sad state of affairs indeed when whether or not a character in a novel is likable is used to decide the quality of the book. I only hope that most readers will see past such simplistic criticisms and enjoy the novel for what it is. Murray has written a wickedly entertaing book and has crafted an intriguing heroine. Highly recommended.

An interesting idea with some good thing in it but....a novel like this, told in the first person, relies on the reader's interest in the narrator's charm or complexity or wit or depth. Since Katherine of A Carnivore's Inquiry has none of these qualities, it's very easy to lose interest and patience with her early on. That's one of the main reasons this novel didn't work for me. Katherine, the narrator, is a very pretentious, unlikable, self-satisfied, bore with insatiable appetites for alcohol, men, meat and cigarettes. And while she seems to find her comeback quips very clever, they only underline her ordinariness. Sabina Murray's writing, in places, is extremely competent--she has talent--but I found myself skimming her book for pages at a time because of some very ostentatious meanderings on art, history, and literature. As for the killer on the loose subplot, I think it's supposed to be all very dark and mysterious but I for one, just your average reader, had it figured out early in the game (waking up after her very first "headache" with a dead guy nearby)and there is no surprise pay off or twist--although I did make it to the end. Also, Katherine seems to think of herself as being quite a seductress--although her personality appearance and lack of style never really attracts anyone except much older men and a string of boring losers. At least that is realistic. I don't think a man of quality in his prime would give Katherine the time of day and she'd find herself turning vegetarian in an awful hurry.

Reviewed by Felicia C. Sullivan, Small Spiral Notebook

Conspicuous consumption, obsessive meditations of cannibalism and its intricate ties to history, literature and art, are prominent themes in Sabina Murray's third book, A Carnivore's Inquiry. A Pen-Faulkner award-winner for the short story collection, The Caprices, Murray introduces us to the itinerant 23yr. old Katherine Shea, who has just arrived to the U.S. after time spent roaming through Europe. Amidst hipster protestors carting signs that read: COLUMBUS BLOODY COLUMBUS and COLUMBUS WAS A MURDER, Katherine encounters a Russian émigré novelist, Boris Naryshkin. As quickly as they meet, they take up house together, and this begins our immersion in this elegant and fiercely engaging novel.

As the story unfolds, the reader becomes more intimate with Katherine's detached persona from which we gather Is due greatly in part to a cold wealthy father who doles our impersonal presents like faxes, and on a trip to the zoo, he confesses, "I suppose I have to feed you." Feeding is keenly appropriate when we meet Katherine's eccentric and heavily medicated mother who spikes her daughter's enemies' Halloween treats with anti-psychotic medication and delivers horrific tales about the bloody Donner party as if they were bedtime stories. The murky family history is deliberate on the part of the author and heightens a surprising and highly satisfying ending. Like mother, daughter becomes obsessed with cannibalism - musing over the works of Goya (notably "Saturn" from the Black Paintings - does Saturn, in his fear of death, devour the son that will assume his throne?), Gericault's "The Raft of the Medusa", the folktales of Hansel and Gretel, and other great works of literature (Melville & Poe) and history that revolve around this theme. Society's taboo is consistently praised by the narrator who considers cannibalism survival of the fittest in an American culture obsessed with goods and consumption. History and art is the brilliant mirror of man's natural and perhaps darker tendencies. The weak perish while the fittest thrive.

Through the course of the novel, Katherine moves to a small cabin Maine and then across the great plains of the Midwest to the ancestral burial grounds of New Mexico. A series of brutal murders follows her passage, and with deft narration and supremely elegant prose, Murray draws out the thinning margins of Katherine's sanity: her desperation for comfort and warmth, yet her need for survival. As the reader speeds towards the novel's climax, the threads of her family's true and frighteningly sinister history quickly unravel.

In a wonderful blurb, Jonathan Ames relates the novel to Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. and he couldn't be more accurate as the two hold up society's obsession with greed, survival by any means necessary and the wonderfully calculated and controlled voice of Patrick Bateman is chillingly similar to Katherine Shea.