A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

Book Overview

Sabina Murray's first book since she won the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Caprices seduces with its dark delight in her taboo subject. When we meet Katherine, the winning-and rather disturbing-twenty-three-year-old narrator, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian ?migr? novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802142001
• ISBN13: 9780802142009
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Perfectly dark and consuming

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 The historical references are intriguing and cringe inducing.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.

Thinking Mans Horror

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.

a brilliant tale with a huge payoff

what has been created by sabina murray here is not a typical cannibal horror novel; rather, by constructing a story of carefully constructed words, literate imagery, and a paced and controlled plot structure, "a carnivore's inquiry" is actually a high-end literary work with a grotesquely graphic centerpoint: cannibalism. i can see how many feel the book is too slow, or perhaps not graphic enough, in the same way watching a psychological thriller won't offer the same payoff to someone expecting a slasher film. be assured: pour over this work. drink the language, and you'll find your mind becomes a haunted world in sabina murray's hands.

An absolutely dark, obsessive & stunning novel

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.

"Unlikable Heroine" equals brilliant novel

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.