As Meat Loves Salt

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Unfortunately for Jacob this is a love primarily characterized by jealousy and suspicion which leads in the end to further outbursts of violent wrath. all of that fit hand-in-glove with his less attractive qualities - condescension and high-handedness, a transparent sort of trickiness, a tendency to overindulge in alcohol, an optimism that veers into thoughtlessness and, finally, a willful blindness to reality. definetly one of my my all time favourites, god this book had me so emotionally torn at the end all i could do was sob. The writing here was just stunning, very descriptive, and even if it was a little overlong in places after the 50% mark (mostly the colony-related bits), I skipped nothing. These are used to the exclusion of the dreaded "b" word throughout the book, despite the fact that they were already antique in the mid-17th century and had caused the recent translators of the Bible no anxiety at all - "And when they were eating, Jesus took b***d and blessed it .

He didn’t even meet the girl until she was locked in her room by her father, across the lane from him. never mind the taste of ashes left in the mouth after the meal is over; that is soon forgotten in the yearning to again consume the dish and recapture its flavor once more. Jacob, who destroys what he loves with the rapacity of his desire, is as compelling as he is appalling…Most impressively, the writing here is flawless.Was it because he didn’t want anything more to do with him no matter what, or because he still loved him and wanted him to have it? It was the only thing he could do really – he wasn’t going to kill himself, after all – not with those character traits, he’ll blame everyone else in the world before he’d blame himself – although perhaps if the colony had ALL gone on a flipping ship it would have been a different book! I also thought the hand was drawn suggestively, as if offering the man’s privates, through the clothes, to an unseen recipient. and I've certainly felt his yearnings for perfect companionship, his stumblings towards some inchoate spirituality, his deep attraction to a person he has deemed as "good", his core of neediness that his pride has transformed into a thorny barrier that warns Beware rather than beckoning Come Hither. He betrays the Digger colony and passively observes its destruction while on the way back from having stolen its money.

As Meat Loves Salt" is the tormented and at times picaresque story of Jacob Cullen, one of three brothers once of some substance but now reduced to serving in a minor aristocratic household.The ending left me emotionally confused, but I’d definitely become emotionally involved, which I think says something about the story’s power. In fact the only character that I think that Jacob truly loved was Aunt, and possibly because she was more of a mother to him than his own mother was. What a terrific book, Jacob sucked me right in and I felt so, so strongly for him and his intense, obsessed love. Throughout each of these adventures we see how Jacob’s ire, and his physical strength, keep pushing him along.

There was one point when I had a WTF moment and that’s when Jacob met up again with Zeb; I didn’t see the point of this – I didn’t understand how Zeb had the knowledge he had, why he didn’t use it and what the meeting was set up to do – it seemed rather pointless. There is also his great friend and lover Christopher Ferris who, for all of his pamphleteering and desire to found a commune based on the equality of all members, is himself a member of the nouveau-rich merchant class who certainly leans on his money and status to accomplish his ends. But Ferris was a grown man, and he had plenty of choices to cast Jacob aside �� and could have done – and didn’t. Being in Jacob’s mind was a fascinating experience, if not exactly a pleasant one (because of his religious guilt).The justifying context of higher meaning that always surrounds the portrayal of violence in true art is absent here. McCann has opted for the intimacies of an internalizing, first-person style which must, in this case, shoulder the double burden of creating a convincing sense of historical period as well as character.

Jacob straddles an intriguing line in this political and social commentary: on the one hand he is a man who finds himself a member of the working class and is ultimately drafted into Cromwell’s New Model Army to fight against the monarchical power structure; on the other hand he is more or less newly fallen into his commoner status, and at heart tends to view himself as a member of a ‘better class’, so his true allegiance to the cause of the commoners may be reasonably questioned. I personally didn't think that any scenes were overly graphic but you certainly get the picture so if you are triggered by violence or sexual content then approach this with caution. I remember it being on my mind for days, probably weeks after I finished it, and it still haunts me.It's completely addictive, heartbreaking, wonderfully written, with characters who creep under your skin and refuse to move. He even dumped poor Nathan without a word, and as far as I know nothing more than a shirt looted from Basing to run off with a man who he knew he couldn’t change.