#tarare

[postcard-from-the-past]

View of Tarare, Beaujolais region of France

French vintage postcard

[becdecorbin]

Tarrare explorations.

some details are inspired by descriptions of him in AK Blakemore's "The Glutton" (a sort of fictionalized character study of how Tarrare may have been as a person).

[peterlorres21stcentury]

The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore

I finally had the chance to return to reading The Glutton in between completing the most mindless data entry imaginable at work today, and I feel like I must pour some thoughts onto the page, now, before I invariably forget to leave my thoughts on Goodreads and no doubt frighten the author with my intensity.

I fucking love this book.

More books need to be like this. I mean the richness of the prose, the depth of every single character we meet in this cursed hero's journey, the level of detail down to the ineffable smells of a time long past. This is what the reading experience needs to be, are you listening to me oh ye publishers, I said fuck your boring sparse sterile "marketable" prose and BURN IT, BURN THE ENTIRE MORIBUND INDUSTRY TO THE GROUND

Now that that's out of the way, this is a fictionalized account of Tarare, French peasant and sideshow performer who came of age during the French Revolution. He was a real man with a real medical condition, though we don't know exactly what, which cursed him with unending hunger. (This particular narrative implies that a serious head injury during his adolescence was responsible for fucking up his sense of appetite, which I found to be a clever and plausible explanation, but again, history knows almost nothing of his early life). He made his living, among other things, as a street performer, eating whatever inedible stuff the crowd threw at him. He was briefly a conscripted solider, and later, (possibly) a child-eating cannibal, though the truth is murky and lost to time.

I knew about Tarare before reading this book, and indeed he was a significant influence on my own character Georg, another ravenous creature in human shape. Georg is significantly more of an impossible fantasy, preferring his meals alive and whole and human, s'il vous plaît (I should say bitte; Georg is the Germanic Tarare). Even so, I see so much of Georg in this version of Tarare, it's uncanny. His sweet simplicity and innocence, his insistent hunger. Even his large-eyedness (he is described in the text as having exceptionally large blue-gray eyes, but I can't help but see and hear dark-eyed Peter Lorre speaking his dialogue. It doesn't help that I imagine Peter Lorre as everything, including Georg, but shhh).

The author of this book said in an interview that she learned to ignore the inner critic voice that said "this will be too gross for anyone." But it's actually not all gory and gross. I found a lot of it intensely sensual, and not just because of my eating fetish! I practically screamed for joy when Tarare falls asleep after gorging himself and dreams of becoming a devourer of worlds:

He gropes his way to the far wall, feeling a quickening, an unbidden rush of blood to his cock. Gropes hard and stun-blind across the stonework until his sticky fingers grasp at the handle of another door, and this he opens, goes through (being alive, feeling in the darkness, he takes himself out of his trousers with a shudder of mad pleasure) and the dawnlight comes into this cool still room through a small window, and falls on stores and pickles and jams and mustards and loaves left to cool under damp white cloth and pale soft-moon cheeses and the boy, the boy Tarare, who quivers in delight and terror of himself and his so alive life and his vast, enormous appetite— * * * In his dream, Tarare eats the whole of France. His face looms over the rooftops of thatch and red tile as the sun will loom on the Day of Judgement, laurelled in cirrus. He scoops the glassy lakes up in his hands and brings them to his mouth to drink. He prises up the wheatfields with his nails and they spiral into fuzzy ribbons, like apple peel. He sees his mother then, so far below him. She comes out of their house and lifts her face upward, and the sweet waters of the Gaude and the Bourget trickle from between his fingers and fall on to her cheeks as a life-giving rain. He grasps at the sides of a mountain and wrenches it from the earth. Holding it to his ear he hears the screams of the little people in their gaily painted houses. Skinny goats roll down the scree like crumbs, unfooted, and the geese take flight. A white swan with its wings outspread passes as a glitter across the vast darkness of his pupil. And when he is full, he sleeps, with his spine curled against the Pyrenees.

And my brain lit up with recognition and I was internally shouting YES, YES THAT IS WHAT GEORG WISHES TOO and by this point I was so happily unhinged I could hardly contain myself. I don't know if the author was writing it with people like me in mind, but I'm glad she did.

[jacqal]

really really loved The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore, got put onto it by Spoonfayse and my wife! my brain at some point decided that this man bore a strong resemblance to Mac Demarco, too....

[photos-de-france]

Rue de Paris et le viaduc, Tarare, Rhône.

[troquets]

Café, Rue J. J. Rousseau, Tarare, Rhône.

[muclunga]

“If my dog were a person they’d be this person”

“If my dog were a person they’d be that person”

If my dog were a person he’d be Tarrare. He eats shit that puts other dogs in the hospital. We dont know why, or even how. Like not to push the bully-breeds-eat-children stereotype but my dog does in fact have a maw that could swallow a french infant whole and idk if being a human would change that.

[vieillesboutiques]

Le petit journal, Maison Cl. Gaynon, Tarare, Rhône.