The novel’s non-linear structure drives the reader through its juiciest parts, man by man. Like her descriptions of slicing, cooking, and devouring flesh, she doesn’t shy away from these details. Sex is a large component to Dorothy’s life and her narrative. But it’s not just any men she cannibalizes it’s the ones who mean most to her. From the first murder that she relates (the one that lands her at Bedford), she unravels the series of lovers-cum-meals throughout her life. When Dorothy takes the first bite of her lover’s haunch, it might as well be fated. She looks back on her charmed life with only a few police interrogations in between. From her perspective as memoirist, the book secures Dorothy’s notoriety-the only thing left to strive for when death in prison is inevitable. Framed as a memoir, A Certain Hunger largely eschews linear narration for ornate vignettes. So, Dorothy does what any critic would do: she starts writing. Her narrator Dorothy Daniels is in her 50s she’s a prolific culinary critic and she is imprisoned for murdering and eating her lovers.ĭorothy knows Bedford Hills prison is inescapable. Summers’s debut novel A Certain Hunger revitalizes the sophisticated cannibal through a feminist slant.
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