I recently read A Certain Hunger. This book had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while and I knew this year I really wanted to detox from social media. So I finally picked it up and finished it!
I guess Spoilers to be warned! I'm just going to talk about it basically, quote a bit. If you find the blurb eye catching I suggest reading it. However I warn those not strong stomached it does have graphic discriptions of Gore and Sex.
Having now digested it a bit longer A Certain Hunger to me is a book that really appeals to me. The bloody scenes of murder and the discriptions of the world have me immersed! Yes, the writing is pompus. To me this writing helps in lifting the mind of Dorothy to tell the reader she finds herself superior to most people. She's a rich white lady who lived through the 1970's-1980's just fine. Hell even as she reached the pinical of the early 2000's she was, more or less okay.
The thing I expected was Cannibalism as the story went on about her killing men. She's a food critic it was more or less fate. Of course it happens, she does eat human flesh, the part that got me was the amount of casual sex idioms and sex scenes. Dorothy is a pinical for sex and how fleeting it is to fuck. She looses virginity as a teen, she fucked tons of men in collage, hell she even got down with a woman even though she herself is not a lesbian. She said so herself.
The other things I didn't expect was the comments of how woman are held in different standards when it comes to murder in their trials and their thinking patterns. One quote that hit me hard was,
"I learned that being female is a prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It's not important that it's real. It's only important that it's tasty." Pg 35.
which is to say a slap in the face to my feminity but I hate to say I almost agree. Men don't really care for our power as woman, they just care to taste the womanhood and purity brought by the Western culture of America.
Even as I read about Dorothy who is warped in her mind and has no guilt for any of her actions I thought about how relivant this book is. (It was published in 2020 so it's hard not to see just how much of a time capsule it is.)
She even uses a quote that woman have been threatened with in politics,
"It was all up to him, you see, whether he lived or died. It was his body, his choice." Pg 151.
I don't know. Maybe it's just because as a born woman I have a bit of a connection to a story about a woman who is unapologetically having sex with men and even killing men who stood near the top. It made me think of how she just has a confidence I never thought to give myself if that makes sense? In some warped way.
The other interesting thing was how much of a homewrecker Dorothy is. She loves having dirt on people, so much so she has a secret cabinet somewhere that holds several secrets of all the people she meets—caring to remember. If she finds herself vindictive she isn't afraid to start pointing fingers at dubious activity she originally turned a blind eye to OR plant evidence on her competitors??? She digs around for a lover in italy because for the longest time couldn't find anything. She loves finding secrets just like cooking food, which is to say she finds both euphoric.
Dorothy is also smart. Scarily so as she murders the men important to her. The knowleadge in development with crime scene analysis, DNA swabs, fingerprinting, GPS in one case. She gets away with her murders in more and more complex ways she clearly is proud of from the discription of what she did and how it happend. Which I find the gloating is what most killers enjoy.
It's a book I would love to read again and really dig the words out of. Several of them I have no fucking clue what they mean. I wish I underlined or highlighted them I would love to just write them out to tell you about it.
I do think there's other points to be made. Her talk of woman in collage. Her way in the world and how lucky she is. How as a rich white woman she says she was able to live luxiouerous in the prison (which isn't that much but better than you think) along with having commentary about how schools and prisions have similar food servings. There being a coup about the food of America controlled by Big Agro which denies us the actual need of nutrisoin over the ones that give most profit. How the internet for a while killed a lot of press companies and even discredited established writers as the way to upload your own thoughts became accessable. There's also some casual racisim, noticable enough that you see the pattern. Again I think this is just beacause Dorothy is a privilaged woman. She sees no problem in her wordeage of other races. The other main female lead she meets and connects with, Emma. Who is an interesting character in her own right. How as a writer Dorothy needs to keep the creative flow even in prison, how she wants to not be forgotten and loves the attention.
Even in this big paragraph I'm sure I missed several points.
