by
Douglas Messerli
Luis
Fernando Verissimo Clube dos anjos,
translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa as (New York: New Directions, 2002)
For years several friends, all rather well-to-do, have been
gathering once a month for a food club, The Beef Stew Club, at each other’s
apartments. Recently—particularly with the death of club founder Ramos and the
introduction of wives at these events—the group has been floundering, and
several members seem disinterested in continuing their participation. These
facts and others the narrator of Luis Fernando Verissimo’s novel The Club of Angels reveals to a man he
accidently encounters at a wine shop. Before the meeting is over the
overweight, compulsively talking Daniel invites his new friend, Lucído—who has
studied cooking in Paris—to join the group, an offer the quiet Lucído refuses;
he does agree, however, to cook the meal of the next occasion which is to be
held at Daniel’s place.
The only thing Daniel discovers about his
new friend—other than he can cook—is that he belongs to a highly secret group
who dine annually in Japan on Fugu fish which, if not prepared by an expert
chef who can properly remove the poisonous portions, quickly kills the diners.
As the younger members learn how to properly cut the fish, volunteers
selectively chosen from the members, dine on their experiments, many of them
dying in the process. Lucído has survived ten such meetings and has been
awarded a fish scale for his survival.
So does Verissimo introduce the major
theme of the story: the extraordinary pleasure of any experience when it
involves an issue of life and death. And soon after, we see that theme played
out by Lucído’s exquisite meals, wherein, one by one, he cooks each of the
members' favorite foods, after which that member dies. The first death,
obviously, could have been an accident, but when the second fêted member dies,
it is clear to the remaining Beef Stew Club members that Lucído is killing
them—perhaps alphabetically—one by one. What is surprising is that, rather that
ceasing their activities, the members seem even more excited about continuing
their meetings, justifying it with the notion that it would be unfair to those
who have gone before them. Despite the outraged protests of wives and lovers,
they proceed with their dinners while trying to unlock the secret of the
unassuming Lucído’s murderous acts.
Gradually, Daniel and another surviving
member discover that Lucído resides in the same apartment where Ramos once
lived, that, in fact, he is connected with Ramos, the only gay member of their
group, a man who died of AIDS. Ultimately, they realize that Lucído and another
group member, Samuel, were the young “wanton boys” of Ramos’s life, one living
in Brazil, the other in Paris, and that Lucído’s acts have had little to do
with them—they have been only “flies” to be squashed on the way to revenge
Ramos’ death, whom Samuel has killed to save him from further suffering.
In the end only Daniel and the murderer
remain, Daniel convinced that he has been allowed to live so that he can
narrate the events. But when Daniel is approached by a strange man, Mr.
Specter, who claims he represents a group of individuals seeking euthanasia,
and—presuming the murders in The Beef Stew Club are related to such
activities—wonders might his friends join. Lucído is interested in the
proposition, particularly since he has yet to cook Daniel’s favorite, gigot d’agneau. And so we are left at
fiction’s end with the possibility of another death or several others in the
newly formed Club of Angels.
Verissimo’s short novel is at times
hilariously funny and, in its recounting of the failures of the club
members—once young men who had every expectation to become successes of their
generation, but who all, in one way or another, failed in their aspirations—a
sad story of the fragility of life, of dreams, delusions and missed
opportunities for joy and love. But it is that very fragility of the tale that
undermines the many directions in which Verissimo might wish to take his
fiction. At once an almost metaphysical study of the relationship of pleasure
and death, a darkly homosexual murder mystery, a revenge murder between the
“wanton boys,” an unconventional detective story, a tale of a mysterious of
union of men determined to self-destruct, a satire about euthanasia, a kind of
post-modern Menippean satire centered on literature (particularly Shakespeare’s
Lear) and love of food, Verissimo’s
fiction simply cannot support all of its conceits. Yet one has no choice but to
tip one’s hat to that grander encyclopedic work he has attempted to achieve.
Los Angeles, December 22, 2002
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (February
2008).
