The Club of Angels
By
Luis Fernando Verissimo
Magaret Jull Costa, trans.
New
Directions; $21.95; 135 pp.
ISBN 0811215008
Reviewed by Tom Bowden
The Beef Stew Club’s ten members are all devoted to the pleasures of gourmet dining. Formed two decades before the story begins, the group rose from the dive diner they had been meeting in to become gourmands of only the finest foods, preened to this heightened state of sensual awareness by one of their members, Ramos, who, as the story begins, passed away ten years ago, dead of AIDS. Once a month, ten times a year, each member would host a dinner, either preparing it himself or hiring a chef to do the work. The group would overeat, talk, drink, and smoke cigars. But ever since the death of Ramos, the group had slowly been losing its charm, its reason for being. Their last dinner, two months before the story takes place, ended in ugly arguments; few members have any desire left to continue the Beef Stew Club.
One club member, Daniel, meets a mysterious man named Lucído in the novel’s opening pages. Intelligent, cultured, and—as it turns out—a fine chef and gourmand himself, Lucído and Daniel hit it off very well, and Lucído offers to cook the Beef Stew Club’s next dinner, which Daniel is scheduled to host. The rest of the Club reluctantly shows up at Daniel’s apartment. The dinner is fantastic. The club members lose their lassitude; their spirits pick up; they want another dinner; they demand to meet the chef; they are happy again.
And then, over night, Abel, one of the club members, dies.
Saddened but not destroyed, the group vows to ford on and have their next dinner as scheduled, with their new hero, Lucído, in charge of cooking. The next dinner, too, is a success. And later that night, after dinner, another of the group dies.
Pretty quickly, the group members—and of course the reader long beforehand— realize they’re being poisoned, and by whom. What The Club of Angels investigates—in its witty, light-hearted way—is why the Beef Stew Club continues to meet, why each member goes willingly to his death, and why nobody does anything to stop Lucído. The novel also answers why Lucído is poisoning the group’s members in the first place.
Obsession, greed, desire, food, incompetence, euthanasia. And a dash of love. These are the elements that drive Verissimo’s novel. Verissimo prefaces his book with an epigram—real, invented, or apocryphal—who knows? It reads as follows:
All desire is a desire for death.
A possible Japanese maxim
Think of this the next time you light up a cigarette, toss back a drink, or bite into some fatty food: What is it that drives people to kill themselves?
—Tom Bowden is the Managing Editor of Tech Directions and serves as Contributing Review Editor to The Education Digest.
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