14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A famous chef's autopsy tells the story of his career
Samuel Ashworth's 'The Death and Life of August Sweeney' is a novel concerned with viscera and the flesh. It begins with Sweeney — a gargantuan chef, of considerable appetites — discovering the source of a wretched odor oozing from the walk-in refrigerator of his celebrated restaurant: It's a pig's head, from the beast he butchered yesterday, carelessly packaged and refrigerated by a trainee chef. 'Even tightly wrapped in Saran the jowl had sloughed off the cheekbones,' Ashworth writes. 'The lower jaw which in life had pulverized black walnuts, chestnuts, and acorns, looked melted; all up the back of its head, pustules wept. The lovely pink of its skin had gone the gray of mortar.'
In no time, Sweeney, like the pig, will be cut up and taken apart.
