Jacket description:
"An international sensation from the moment of its first publication in France, Sweet Death is a novel of heartstopping intensity, black humor, and passion not easily forgotten.
A nameless young woman lies across her bed in a cramped Parisian garret in front of an open notebook. She begins.
'Sunday is always a big dose of the blahs, a profound emptiness in the stomach that all the sweets in the world couldn't fill. It's a very precise longing for frangipani topped with golden meringue at teatime, between the digestive torpors of noon and the boredom of the evening ahead. It's a useless day, devoted to the warm bed where I'm still lazing around, to no-exit dreams, to a steady stream of desserts simmering away, and the aromas from a hot oven.'
In voluptuous, hypnotic prose we are drawn into the closed world of an obsession. Slowly, as courses of jams, French pastries, puddings and candied fruits are carefully consumed and catalogued, a monster begins to appear. With mounting unease we watch a young woman attempt to satisfy a rapacious hunger with the blind passion of a woman tortured by a fatal attraction. She is fat and growing fatter.
At first, she tests her powers, visiting the cafes and bakeries, the tearooms on the rue de Rivoli which cater to the heavily powdered old ladies who sit with their lap dogs and sip bitter chocolate sweetened only by tablespoons of sugar. Her mother arranges for private fittings with her expensive couturiers, but the subtle tailoring and carefully chosen colors are quietly defeated. Slowly, the secrets of a childhood emerge--a glamorous mother, a lonely child, the unwelcome result of a soured love affair, and a superstitious and overprotective maid. Nineteen, withdrawing into a strange and agonized solitude, surrounded by vaster and vaster quantities of sweets and delicacies, she becomes more and more secure in her revenge. Her quest leads her, at an ever quickening pace, from an unloved exile to the embrace of her own flesh.
Told with dazzling narrative brilliance and the haunting power of an impassioned soliloquy, by turns coldly methodical and intensely erotic, Sweet Death is an astonishing parable of a woman's obsession." ( )