Angelica J.

Brief and dreamlike and vaguely experimental, "Fermentation" is a relentlessly sensual novel, and although it features a few sex scenes, I'm not sure I'd call it "erotic." Set in a exoticized Paris during an excruciatingly hot summer that coincides unpleasantly with a garbage collector's strike, this one is by turns sexy, stomach-churning, and enthralled with the pleasures of fine cheeses. Perhaps "sensual," a word that's too often used as a weak euphemism for "sexual" might really be the better term for this one: it's a book about pleasure and hunger, though some readers may be disappointed that it's often more concerned with cheese than sex. It's also an interesting exercise in writing the body: "Fermentation" is very much a novel of the nose. It made me want to visit a good cheese shop and stimulated my olfactory memory more than any other novel I've read since Patrick Süskind's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer", though not always to pleasant effect. The author describes city's grime, its growing, fetid trash piles and its oppressive, stultifying heat almost too well. She seems to want to remind the reader that fermentation can produce things that are both enormously satisfying and unbearably nauseating, and she mostly succeeds.

In the final analysis, this novel's prose is a bit too purple, its protagonists a bit too gauzily idealized, and its concerns a bit too forthrightly sexual, to be called entirely literary, but it is well-written and the author rarely goes over the limit. Even its dialogue crackles nicely once in a while, which is pretty rare in this genre. It's not entirely satisfying, but is certainly interesting. Recommended to those who seek out curious books for their own sake and to readers who can pick out a good Camembert.… (meer)