His belly distended, his teeth ground to stumps, his eyes wild: this, we are told, is a man who ate cats; corks; rats; belts; 30 pounds of beef lung and liver; a golden fork; 75 eggs. This is a man who ate a child. Or did he?
A.K. Blakemore’s second novel, The Glutton, tells the true story of Tarare, a peasant from 18th-century France who consumed an appalling catalogue of the edible and inedible as his country consumed itself in revolution. Or, as Blakemore writes: “He was a sight of rare, arresting hideousness, even in those times when severed heads were carried dripping through the streets.”
