The Taste of a Man

The cultural vertigo that Drakulic chronicles in her stylish essays on post-communist Eastern Europe (Cafe Europa, etc.) also permeates this slim tale of obsessive sex and cannibalism, which unfolds against the unlikely backdrop of New York University's foreign language departments. As the novel opens on Christmas Day, Tereza, a Polish poet, has just spent three days scrubbing the blood stains from the floorboards and wallpaper of the small East Village apartment she shared with her lover, Jose, a married Brazilian anthropologist. With methodical detachment, she recounts their affair, which began in September when she spied Jose in the New York Public Library researching a book on the 1972 plane crash in the Andes, whose survivors resorted to eating human flesh. Within three days, Jose and Tereza move in together and undertake a Last Tango in Paris-like odyssey of carnal desire and cultural difference that subsumes everything in her life. Vignettes of Tereza's mother's death, her childhood in a Polish village and her first communion are interspersed with recollections of erotic meals and language games--and fits of jealousy fueled by a weekend Jose spends with his wife. Jealousy soon mutates to Tereza's grim resignation to make Jose the main dish of their own last supper. The novel hits giddy notes of gothic weirdness as Tereza, after ritually dismembering the body in the bathtub, rewards herself ""for a job well done"" by reading fashion magazines in bed and taking a bubble bath. But despite the mad delirium of the affair itself and the creepily meditative tone of the novel, Tereza's sudden bloodlust, in the end, remains simply too implausible to digest. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo. (Aug.)