Tucked into a stark first-floor corner space flanked by a motorcycle stand on one side and a barbershop on the other, Restaurant Eels had a laid-back, Scandinavian vibe and a youthful clientele who clearly knew a thing or two about food. And Ferrand’s food was worth the trip—including his signature smoked eel with Granny Smith apple, licorice root, and hazelnuts made with European eel cultivated on a small farm in Greece. Each plate was beautifully composed, essentially a work of art. But I’ll admit to a pang of disappointment. For once the dinner crowd thinned and we had a chance to talk, Ferrand confessed he had not given eels a lot of thought.
So why name your restaurant Eels, I asked?
“Ah, that,” he said. “Of course. Eels are something very special. They speak to me of something I can’t explain, something beyond words, perhaps beyond memory. I’m sorry I can’t say more, but I am a chef, not a poet. Maybe you would like a dessert?”
Among my earliest memories as a small child is the sound, on a summer evening, of a peal of church bells echoing off the hillsides around the village in Hampshire where my grandparents lived. Over the years since then I have been intrigued by sounds of almost every kind – though I do exclude a few, such as some of those in the genre of music known as “noise”, which a friend says he finds soothing, but which I find about as welcome as putting my head in a buzzsaw.
A few years ago I went to see a flock of knots (birds in the wader family) flying inshore over mudflats off the Norfolk coast. The birds flashed in and out of view as they wheeled and turned in synchrony. It was a wonder to see, but more than the sight it was the sound made by thousands of pairs of fluttering wings as they came overhead that amazed me.
Now he’s reviving all 21 narrators of The Spinning Heart a decade on, despite the fact that one is dead and others will have met their ends before the story is done. If violence was simmering gently in the earlier novel, now it’s frothing over the sides.
It was a logical step from this apprehension of the Devil to the suspicion that certain people had done deals and bargains with him, selling their immortal souls for worldly benefits. My favorite of the many stories that Thomas recounts involves a student at Cambridge University, who was struggling to understand one of his scholarly texts. The Devil appeared in the guise of a Master of Arts, who elucidated the text and offered the student a trip to Italy and a degree from the University of Padua. “Two days later,” we learn, “the hapless student’s gown was found floating in the river,” the student having paid a rather steep price for a spot of academic help.
These kinds of tales, as Ed Simon explores in his lively new book, “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain” (Melville House), existed as myths that enacted both resistance and control.
In Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity (2024), the former Allure digital beauty editor, Sable Yong implicitly argues that the democratization of the modern beauty industry has left warm, bright rooms empty by permanently opening the doors to illuminated ballrooms. Ostensibly, anyone with a credit card and a high pain tolerance can become the kind of beautiful that makes life easier and more fulfilling. Yet this accessibility has also created the high, punishing stakes of modern-day beauty: you can either be in the illuminated ballroom or out in the snow—there seem to be few rooms, of varying warmth and brightness, between. Now, the rewards for beauty appear greater and more diverse than ever, ranging from a glowing, beautified vision of oneself in a tiny Zoom window to a Kardashian-sized cultural empire.
Taschen has released a new two-volume book on the enduring legacy of Life magazine and its close ties with Hollywood and the wider film industry. Titled Life. Hollywood, the books chronicle the rise of Life, from its transformation into a photo-led weekly news magazine in 1936, to becoming the most widely-read publication of its kind in the 1940s, to its eventual dissolution as a weekly in 1972.