Tenderloin

February 19, 2024
The bloody and enticing latest from Sorman (Life Sciences) centers on a butcher who tends to his abattoir like a priest to his chapel, seeking the primordial “state of nature” behind the meat. The story begins sometime before Pim opens his now famous butcher shop in contemporary Paris, tracking his two-year apprenticeship in Brittany. Prone to inexplicable tears and sporting a prime rib tattooed on his shoulder blade, he first ascends to the “tragic and secret citadel” of a slaughterhouse before moving to Paris. Known throughout the meat-processing industry for his mystical sense of cuts and rigorous attitude toward all “born beef,” Pim possesses a bone-deep sympathy for animals; he even dreams of becoming one and making his body a banquet. Instead, he settles on an unnerving act of defiance against his fellow man. Sorman’s novel is primitive in the best sense, slicing through pretense to return the flesh to its “starring role” in nature and society. Gourmands will be sated by this slim and sublime morsel.

March 1, 2024
An alienated French butcher ponders the line between human and animal. When the reader first encounters Pim, the protagonist of this jarring novel, he's the subject of a promotional video designed to get people to work with meat. "He's in the opening shot, swathed in white and dignity, wielding a knife," Sorman writes via Vergnaud's translation--and, soon enough, the novel doubles back to show us Pim's early days as an apprentice butcher. From the outset, Pim is a contradictory figure, a young man who sometimes looks at his hands and cries but will also "go mad for meat." Over half the novel follows Pim as he learns the butcher's craft, obsessively studying the bodies of the pigs and cows at the center of his profession. Occasionally Sorman takes a step back from Pim's story and adopts a documentarylike tone, chronicling things like a particularly violent pig and a history of the slaughterhouse. Throughout, she poses philosophically weighty statements: "Does the slaughterer truly kill animals without anger and without hate? The apprentices are taught that it's the law of nature" is one memorable example. Much as Pim is both a compelling figure and an alienating one, so too is this book unsettling in its imagery, including a reference to "enormous livers, like scarlet jellyfish." As Pim grows older, he becomes a solitary figure, a man without friends and with only sporadic lovers. His obsessions lead him to a surreal final sequence, though it's unclear if this will be the action that will cause him to, in Sorman's words, "go down in the history of butchery, his name written in ink." At its best, this novel encapsulates humans' relationship with the food we consume. You may not look at meat the same way after reading this novel.

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