Fermentation

by Angelica J.

Overview

Fermentation is a book about the senses, about carnal pleasures and one woman's insatiable appetite. Set in a French hill town during a searing heat wave, this erotic novel is a surreal and sensual tale of desire, satisfaction, and need. In the midst of a scorching summer, the garbagemen go on strike, the air turns stagnant, and the novel's young narrator, Odissa, becomes pregnant. In the eerie calm of the city's relentless heat, she soon discovers that, rather than pickles and ice cream, her pregnant craving is for cheese. And as her baby grows, Odissa makes her way through a variety of cheeses, from Brie to parmigiano to Roquefort, and finds that satisfying her hunger spawns a series of incredibly erotic dreams and fantasies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802135902
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/28/1998
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.50(d)

Editorial Reviews

When Odissa, a young British writer newly arrived in France, meets a circus fire-eater who intrigues and then impregnates her, we manage to suspend our disbelief for the sake of this occasionally artsy novel's generous descriptions of great cheese and kinky sex. The sights and smells of an unnamed French city (ripening under a heat wave and a garbage collectors' strike) provoke extravagant culinary-erotic dreams in Odissa. But she repeatedly balks when her lover, Serge, demands that she spew flames for him. The obssession breaks them up: what Odissa must finally (and violently) be forced to do, circus cohort Justine has done willingly. Rid of Serge, Odissa sets out daily to satisfy her pregnancy-driven craving for cheese. Gorged on Emmental or Brie, sleepless in the heat and haunted by the burned face of Justine, she slips further into politically incorrect, cheese-fueled explicit fantasyimagine Penthouse Forum as written by a hyper-literary, masochistic Helena Bonham-Carter. Although there are some lovely descriptions here, and although the sentences themselves have a languid grace ("Waxy Edams and moony Bries were piled next to close-packed rows of blues"), by the end, it's hard to care whether Serge will return for good to Odissa's bed, as her fantasies of degradation grow more wearisome than arousing. (Aug.) FYI: The pseudonymous Angelica Jacob, as she is listed on the copyright page, works in the London publishing world.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

There has been a spate of novels recently offering recipes as remedies or curses. Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (LJ 9/1/92), which was made into a motion picture, and Jane Kolpen's charming fable, The Secrets of Pistoulet (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1996), come immediately to mind. Fermentation follows this style except that the chapter headings are not recipes but descriptions of various cheeses the pregnant heroine craves. She also craves Serge, a fire-eater and street performer who wants to teach her his craft. The pseudoymous Angelica J., who works in London in the publishing industry, explores the nature of helpless attraction using the familiar metaphor of moth and flame, partially refreshed by the protagonist's feeding the dead moth to her pet chameleon. The final chapter heading is for "Handmade Cheese," made from her breast milk. Unfortunately, the author so distances herself from her characters that they are hard to care about. Our heroine's erotic and violent dreams may entice some reades, but not may. An optional purchase.Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll., Bronxville, N.Y.

Library Journal

Categorized by its publisher as "Fiction, Erotica," here's a small British morsel in the love-and-cooking genre from the pseudonymous Angelica J., about whom nothing is revealed except that she (it seems) "was born in 1963 and works in publishing."

The young woman Odissa (no last name) meets the traveling fire-eater Serge (no last name) in the French town of Cauterets. Soon after Serge's departure, Odissa receives a blank postcard and travels to the city (unnamed) of its postmark, where she spends 17 days hunting for Serge. Lovemaking ensues, along with some very rough treatment by Serge having to do with his wish to teach Odissa the art of fire-eating and her understandable desire not to—after all, she's already jealous of Serge's other love-mate, Justine, who travels with him in performance and whose face is hideously fire-scarred. Odissa, unsurprisingly, becomes pregnant, and, also unsurprisingly, Serge departs for a long time on his travels. More surprising, perhaps, is that Odissas's pregnancy-craving is for cheese, and that the chapters she narrates as her pregnancy advances are each pressed into association with one type of it or another—Brie, Roquefort, etc.—and thereby the trope develops that just as cheese ferments in the making, so a baby does in the gestating. One dream per chapter also occurs (Serge warned that cheese before bed would bring bad dreams), constituting much of the erotica part of the undertaking. One dream involves forcible submission in a pool of spilled milk, another a simultaneous rape and throat-cutting, yet another a carnival event consisting of a wall with holes in it through which male customers extend their pertinent parts.

Symbols galore (fire, drought, rain, childbirth) can't transform this small, two- dimensional, and rather self-conscious tale into something beyond itself; nor does an existentially affectless tone—Kosinski comes to mind—succeed in doing much beyond achieving its opposite, the portentous and affected.

Kirkus Reviews