Tenderloin

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This novel tells the story of a boy, Pim, who, after finishing school, chooses a profession and decides his life: to become a butcher, the best butcher in the world; to study anatomy, to dissect quarters and halves, to open a shop in Paris. It is a tough school, but everything can be overcome when there is a calling. Pim has his own way of dealing with meat: he identifies with the animals brought to slaughter, caresses girls while searching under their skin for quarters and thighs, and strives for perfection in every compassionate and precise gesture. Pim embodies a knight ready for battle, for the grand tournament of roasts, for the challenge of deboning a calf as if its pink flesh were the heart of a princess. He is an executioner who sheds tears of tenderness for a pig, who dreams of closing himself in the dismembered body of a cow, who is never satisfied with his passion. And he is a boy: tall, lanky, soft, serious as an angel, modest as an artist. This novel tells a strange love story because, as Lévi-Strauss's epigraph explains, "the simplest way to identify the other with oneself is always to eat him."