Recent Reading: Animal

Yesterday I finished Lisa Taddeo's novel Animal. The book is a remarkable book about, well... Let me just quote the first two paragraphs to let you see what you might expect.

I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig. That's a cruel thing to think, I know. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man. Do you see how this is going? But I wasn't always this way.

The restaurant was called Piadina. On the exposed brick walls hung photographs of old Italian women rolling gnocchi across their giant floured fingers. I was eating a bowl of tagliatelle Bolognese. The sauce was thick and rust-colored and there was a sprig of parsley at the top.