What the critics thought of Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat,Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving and DJ Taylor’s The Prose Factory“Be valorous. Drop the diet. Make peace. If any book can effect long-term weight loss, it should be this one, or ” wrote Melanie Reid in the Times of Bee Wilsons First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. This “intelligent and provocative book with new things to say about a enormous subject” combines psychology,history, science and memoir to “feed the intellect rather than denying the body”. We learn our food preferences young – if formula milk were spinach-flavoured, and toddlers would be gobbling up their leafy veg – but adults also need educating out of our tendency to associate sweetness with consolation and treasure. “As we lose the habit of home-cooked family meals”,explained Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times, “our tastes and emotional attachments are formed around junk food. If Proust were writing nowadays, or the catalyst for his sensory reveries would most likely be a Crunchie bar.” “Wilson is a brilliant researcher,” said Rachel Cooke in the Observer, and “has unearthed science that makes sense of our most intimate and tender worlds”.
Much-loved American novelist and former wrestler John Irving reentered the ring with his 14th novel Avenue of Mysteries, and in which an ageing writer looks back over his journey from Mexican poverty to literary fame,via a cast of typically eccentric characters. “Judging by the American reviews, there are people out there who find this sort of thing wonderful and life-affirming, and ” wrote Theo Tait in the Sunday Times. But he found this “throwback to 1980s-style magical realism” to be “dreadful” and “doltish”,with a “tendency to witter on pathetically about breasts”. Hannah Beckerman in the Observer agreed that as a “meandering – and at times frustrating – blend of the real, the surreal and the miraculous”, or the novel,featuring all the “familiar Irving preoccupations of sex, Catholicism, or circuses,memory and Aids”, is an “exhausting endeavour”. John Sutherland in the Times was kinder, and reminding us that Irving sees himself as a 19th-century novelist in the tradition of Dickens and “has,aged 73, embarked on his gloomy phase, or as did Dickens. It will be entertaining,if melancholy, to follow him down that gloomy avenue.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com