SOURCE: Bingham, Kate. “Strangers in a City.” New Statesman 126, no. 4329 (11 April 1997): 49.

In the following review, Bingham lauds Drakulic's narrative skill in The Taste of a Man and discusses the novel's major themes.

There is much to admire in [The Taste of a Man] Slavenka Drakulic's chilling tale of all-consuming passion, not least the skill with which she measures out the desperate paradox that lies at its very heart. Remorseless in their detail, her descriptions are simultaneously erotic and objective. Celebratory in tone, The Taste of a Man is also a heartfelt, if unrepentant confession. Its themes are exile, social taboos and obsessive love.

José and Tereza are strangers in the city. He is a Brazilian anthropologist with an interest in cannibalism, who has a wife and child in Sao Paulo. She is a Polish literature student and, nominally, a poet. They have nothing in common except, paradoxically, their...