Tenderloin
Can killing be an act of love? Hypnotic, gruesome, and exultant, Joy Sorman's macabre ballet whirls from industrial slaughterhouses to the boutique butcher shops of Paris.
Pim is a delicate youth--stringy, solemn, and prone to bouts of unexplained weeping. When he enrolls in trade school as an apprentice butcher, his mentors have low expectations, but his lanky body conceals a peculiar flame: a passionate devotion to animals. In an industry that strives to distance the chopping block from the dinner plate, his ardor might seem like a handicap, but Pim rises through the knife-wielding ranks with a barely-tethered zeal. He scours blood from floor mats and stacks carcasses in the cold room by day. By night he tries to slake his appetites: at the table, over boudin sausage and steak tartare, and in bed, with women whose flanks, ribs, and haunches he maps as they undress each other.
Pim's professional successes mount but his cravings gnaw. In the library he teases out histories, like the blood-drinking forerunners to vampirism or the Medieval trial of a killer pig, sentenced to death by hanging. Meat crowds his waking thoughts. Even as he carves ripe flesh from exquisite bone, he labors to close the gap between man and beast--to be seen, understood, even loved, by a primordial mind. Will this ravenous obsession yield to madness, or to ecstasy?
With shades of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Joy Sorman's Tenderloin is an ethical foray, fever dream, and paean to an ageless hunger. Vegetarians and carnivores alike are invited to feast at this sumptuous literary table. After all, we are what we eat.
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Joy Sorman is a novelist and documentarian who lives and works in Paris. She has written fourteen books, including Boy, boys, boys, which was awarded the 2005 Prix de Flore, La peau de l'ours, À la folie, and Sciences de la vie, which was published by Restless Books in 2021 as Life Sciences. Tenderloin, for which she received the 2013 François Mauriac prize from l'Académie française, is Sorman's second novel to be translated into English.
Lara Vergnaud is a translator of prose, creative nonfiction, and scholarly works from the French. She is the recipient of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and the French Voices Grand Prize, and has been nominated for the National Translation Award. She lives in southern France.
"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." -- Publishers Weekly
"In documentary-style present tense, Sorman takes us sensually into the sights (viscera and guts) and sounds (pigs squealing) and smells (earthy and stomach-turning) of Pim's world, and into all that goes into bringing meat to our dinner plates. . . . Surreal and oddly entertaining in its macabre details, Tenderloin will certainly provoke thoughts on the ethics of meat, even for the most committed carnivores." --JR Ramakrishnan, Electric Lit
"A brutal and beautiful book that contemplates the necessity of death in life, and whether our complicity and consumption can be done with honor. I loved this book, equally a testament to ritual and craft, humanity and husbandry. In Tenderloin, butchering is a kind of baptism, and with equal precision and tenderness does Sorman remove the fig leaf, that flimsy belief, that we humans are anything other than animals." --Ling Ling Huang, author of Natural Beauty
"As a lifelong vegetarian not necessarily opposed to meat eating but moreso the meat industry, I loved this book. I'll never forget this feverish love story between man and meat. Wonderfully translated into breathless prose, Tenderloin is tender indeed." --Jade Song, author of Chlorine
"Here, meat becomes an obsession, both for the author and for her character... Ah, the drama of being a carnivore! And the guilty pleasure with which one opens this little blood-red book, which borrows from the magic of reality as much as from the truth of the fable." --Augustin Trapenard, Elle France
"Through these tribulations of an old-fashioned craftsman, Joy Sorman denounces the scandal of chain massacres, advocates friendship for animals, breeding in music, rituals, the gesture that kills. We are sawn by this knowledge. Its lean style is tender like a mother-raised veal cutlet." --Emmanuelle de Boysson, Marie Claire France
"An astonishing read. . . . Sorman manages to deftly and efficiently tease out questions of labor and class; industry, ecology, and public health; the moral value of nonhuman life." --Ania Szremski, 4Columns
"You may not look at meat the same way after reading this novel." --Kirkus Reviews
"Sorman dissects language with the same dexterity Pim uses to handle and carve meat; she appropriates it down to the smallest anatomical detail to compose a novel torn between realism and fantasy, which evokes the flayed oxen of Rembrandt or Soutine." --Elisabeth Philippe, Les Inrockuptibles
"With a lot of humour, Joy Sorman leads us at a frenzied pace into a universe as delirious as it is precisely documented, the overabundance of technical and realistic details further accentuating the epic and fantastic dimension." --Emmanuelle Caminade, L'Or des Livres
"We revel in the style of Joy Sorman, very pictorial, rich, hyper-realistic, sometimes technical, sometimes lyrical." --Marie-Christine Blais, La Presse
"One foot in reporting, the other in fiction, Joy Sorman places her books in specific universes... not hesitating to introduce the fantastic into the prosaic." --L'Express
"Tenderloin will either make you go vegan or crave the best steak of your life. It honestly could go either way because Sorman's writing and Vergnaud's translation are so good. This novel is so physical, so gruesome and disgusting and at the same time so sensual and beautiful. Not for everyone but so worth it if you try." --Anton Bogomazov, Bookseller, Politics & Prose
"A contemplative, seductive book. Sorman makes butchery and the abattoir seem romantic, lush, beautiful as much as horrific and violent. Tenderloin forces the reader to contemplate what removes people from "meat" status, if anything, and whether the butcher might also be an artist. Sorman considers obsession, industry, and identity within this slim volume. Tenderloin might not call to all, but to those that let themselves get sucked into its pages, it's likely to surprise and seduce." --Quinn Fairchild, Bookseller, Green Apple Books & Music
"Growing up, as many of us have, estranged from farm life - removed from the animal "killing fields" of the meat industry - we may find the content of this book a bit of a shock. It is a part of reality, however, especially for those of us who are carnivores (meat eaters), vegans (meat avoiders), or omnivores (those of us who eat fruits, vegetables and meats with equal satisfaction). So, now that we know everyone is covered here, why not take a peek at the life of Pim, whose skill lies in being a butcher. In fact, it is more than skill that assures him a place at this table. Animals, food of the meaty kind, and the history of blood's place in human life are his passion. Even women undressing each other cause him to imagine the lines that define the various parts of their bodies. What gives with this guy? There's always something new to learn and this novel from France by Joy Sorman (as translated by Lara Vergnaud) will give you something new to think about, for sure... But it's not for the squeamish. Fair warning." --Linda Bond, Auntie's Bookstore
"An uncanny and lyrical deep dive into the meat industry, Tenderloin is a love letter to the art form of butchery. Both hyper-realistic and fantastical, it denounces the commercialization of the industry through Pim's obsession." --Katherine Nazarro, Porter Square Books
