David Cronenberg

While freelance journalist Naomi places her safety in the hands of a suspicious grad student to investigate a sexual philosopher's murder, her rival and lover, Nathan, contracts a rare STD while documenting a surgeon's controversial work in organ trafficking. A first novel. 75,000 first printing.

A Novel

Consumed

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

Too long. Unnecessary amount of tech descriptions. Somewhat fascinating. Body horror does not work as well in this shape as it does in Cronenberg's early films.

“An eye-opening dazzler” (Stephen King) about a pair of globetrotting, gore-obsessed journalists whose entanglement in a French philosopher’s death becomes a surreal journey into global conspiracy from legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg. Stylish and camera-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social-media age. Naomi finds herself drawn to the headlines surrounding a famous couple, Célestine and Aristide, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead, and Aristide has disappeared. Police suspect him of killing her and consuming parts of her body. Yet Naomi sets off to find him, and as she delves deeper into the couple’s lives, she discovers the news story may only skim the surface of the disturbing acts they performed together. Journalist Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon named Zoltán Molnár, once sought by Interpol for organ trafficking. After sleeping with one of Molnár’s patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe’s and travels to Toronto, determined to meet the man who discovered the syndrome. Dr. Barry Roiphe, Nathan learns, now studies his own adult daughter, whose bizarre behavior masks a devastating secret. These parallel narratives become entwined in a gripping, dreamlike plot that involves geopolitics, 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, cancer, and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex. Consumed is an exuberant, provocative debut novel from one of the world’s leading film directors, a writer of “fierce sculptural intensity” (Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review) who makes it “impossible to look away” (Publishers Weekly).

Richard Binder

This is very typical Cronenberg territory, but it also has that flavor of a foreign film where very intellectual and philosophical people speak of sex and death in lofty and heightened tones. That aspect might be unbearably pretentious if Cronenberg didn't have such a wicked sense of humor -- just when you think your shoulders are going to slump under the weight of so much -ismspeak, he zings you with an observation that amounts to an unexpected punchline, and that's refreshing. But yeah, a lot of sex, a lot of bodily functions, a lot of surgery, a lot of technology (the descriptions of the various cameras and computers being used border kind of on "American Psycho"-lite) and a LOT of talk about the implications of all of the above, and I might have just thought of it as a three-star book made for a very specific audience if it weren't for the ending. I may be in a minority about this, but I found the wrap-up to be creepier in its implications than any of the more graphic stuff that led up to it. This book is gonna bug me for a while and for all the right reasons.

Bryan Alexander

"Let me unbox you..."
-Aristide Arosteguy

  


This is a novel best suited to two audiences: those looking for innovative horror, and people interested in visionary possibilities of new media. It would also be good for fans of first-time novelist David Cronenberg's work in film, but I suspect they'd fall into the first two categories.

(I fall into all three, being a lifelong Cronenberg fan since I first saw the mad genius of Videodrome.)

Consumed is, as one might expect from the author, a challenging and strange book. I can describe the plot like this: two journalists investigate a Parisian crime, wherein a husband killed and ate part of his wife. The (former) couple were influential philosophers, Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, and a cute parody of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They made waves with a theory of consumer society (hence one meaning of the title). Naomi and Nathan are lovers and colleagues, fellow gadget hounds, but they usually live apart, and follow their joint inquiry along separate, parallel lines.

What follows is a picaresque or road trip, as the two N's travel the world: Paris, Japan, Canada, Hungary, Cannes, Holland. Cronenberg teasingly refuses to give us much local color, offering instead the thin, usually tech-mediated views of our protagonists, or sketches of the people they meet.

So much for the plot's initial action. But I'd also need to tell you more about the book's style. Consumed adores its surfaces and fetishes. It lovingly describes clothing, technologies, record covers (oh yes), body parts, and interior decorating exactly as far as major characters obsess over them. Technology looms large; this is very much a novel about modern digital devices and how we intimately use them.

Consumed is also about pushing against discussing awkward or awful topics, mostly in a horrific way. Without spoilering too much, I can mention offhandedly cannibalism, murder, autocannibalism, apotemnophilia, acrotomophilia, deformed body parts, sexually transmitted diseases, cancerous body parts, and medical fetishism. Which brings us back to Cronenberg's tone. He doesn't revel in these topics, but comes to them thoughtfully, from a character's mind, almost (and sometimes literally) clinically.

Back to the plot, and now I must hide some words, because after about 40% of the book Naomi meets (view spoiler)[Aristide Arosteguy, and the first plot halts while we dive into this character and his backstories. This sets up the final third of the book, a surprise plot involving Célestine Arosteguy, one of her old lovers, the North Korean film scene, insects as fetish and metaphor and political plot, hacking hearing aids by signals coded in old LPs (!), and an arcane conspiracy. This could easily have become a standalone story. North Korea looms large, ultimately, although that's one country we don't visit, and Rom a character whose viewpoint we never obtain. We end in uncertainty, many plot threads left hanging in the air. Things look bad for shanghai'd Naomi and for Nathan, about to receive an unpleasant visit. There are hints of an ideology or even prophetic faith arising around the perhaps dead Arosteguys. (hide spoiler)]

In a sense Consumed is an update of Videodrome, a deep dive into our current media obsessions and how they warp (and delight) ourselves. "Naomi was in the screen" is how it begins. In a sense this is about limitation, especially by the end. Yet Cronenberg isn't simply a techno-skeptic, at least not in the text; he's too fond of devices and their powers. He sees their depths, and shares them with us through his well-informed, perverse vision.

It's also a horror novel by any stretch of the term. There's body horror, dread, suspense, and even a touch of something deeper by the end.

It is also funny, although not everyone laughs with me. There are running gags, like many characters' obsession with landing a New Yorker story, or in Naomi and Nathan's banter, or nearly everything the bad Hungarian surgeon says.

I'd recommend this to the audiences mentioned above. 

NB: I didn't read Consumed, but listened to it as audiobook. William Hurt does a terrific job overall, handling a wide range of accents. He seems especially at home with Aristide Arosteguy's voice. Early on Hurt inserts odd, non-Shatnerian pauses into sentences that disconcert, but this ceases by the middle of the book. It's a pleasure to listen to.

David Cronenberg--the celebrated Canadian film director, lauded by "The New York Times "for creating "some of the best, most challenging, most unusual English-language films of the last twenty years," and named a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France--turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, disturbing intersection of desire and decay in "Consumed," his highly anticipated debut novel. In the book-filled, artfully messy Paris apartment of the famous French intellectuals Celestine and Aristide Arosteguy, an astonishing discovery is made--the grisly, butchered remains of Celestine, partially eaten. Her husband, sought by police for questioning, is nowhere to be found. Naomi Seberg, a young journalist, embarks upon a quest to uncover the truth of Celestine's death and Aristide's role in it. She travels to Tokyo to interview the suspected cannibal, while her boyfriend, Nathan Math, a medical journalist, seduces the cancer patient of a controversial Hungarian doctor and contracts a sexually transmitted disease. He traces the famous discoverer of the diseases to Forest Hill Village in Toronto, where he encounters the most interesting journalistic subject of all. In energetic, inventive, and provocative prose, Cronenberg creates an extraordinary, sexually charged novel of dark impulses and appetites that reminds us that the boundaries of lover and beloved aren't nearly as defined as we believe them to be.

Consumed A Novel

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