Tenderloin

Can killing be an act of love? Hypnotic, gruesome, & exultant, Joy Sorman's macabre ballet whirls from industrial slaughterhouses to the boutique butcher shops of Paris.

Pim is a delicate youth—stringy, solemn, & 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 & stacks carcasses in the cold room by day. By night he tries to slake his appetites: at the table, over boudin sausage & steak tartare, & 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. Meat crowds his waking thoughts. Even as he carves ripe flesh from exquisite bone, he labors to close the gap between man & 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, & paean to an ageless hunger.

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Joy Sorman is a novelist & documentarian who lives & works in Paris. She has written fourteen books, including Boys, 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, & scholarly works from the French.