The Butcher     by Alina Reyes, Translated by D Watson Original title: Boucher Original language: French Published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback, 208 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.59 x 8.27 x 5.62 ISBN: 0802134505 List Price: $12.00, £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.60 Published by Minerva Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 68 pages List Price: £3.99 Not available for ordering Published by Mandarin Pub. Date: 1994 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 80 pages Not available for ordering Published by Methuen Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: 70 pages List Price: £9.99 Not available for ordering

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Here’s something difficult for the English and their writers; the guiltlessly erotic novella with an intense sexual engagement capturing the true obsessive, transgressive flavour of a passion. This is probably an easier subject for Latins, not living under the cultural regime of mental self-policing about sexuality that originated from Puritan Protestantism. Although this philosophy is no longer followed in law or custom it seems to hang on in the English spirit, however many sexual and feminist ‘revolutions’ rock its boat.


This little book is clever in a very French way too in teasing around its subject by merging it with that of food, specifically the glistening cuts of meat or offal and the heavy carcasses of animals and ‘the butcher’ himself, a solidly built sexually-obsessed man with thick limbs and stomach who gobbles down raw eggs and giant steaks. Reyes joyfully pursues her clever idea by making the display and exposure of foods mirror the display and exposure of the body in a way that is both giddy-making and knowledgeable.


More than anything the book in English reads like a wonderfully bracing slap in the face of the whingeing, tricksy and anorexic heterosexual politics of middle-class England, because it emerges instead from a culture (France) that has managed to joyfully maintain at least some of its appetites.

‘Day was breaking, killing off the shadows with their retinue of mysteries. And the light was even more disturbing, it forced you to see everything, know everything. Nevertheless, I welcomed it with a smile.’ p65