Jim Crace may not be as well known as Martin Amis or A. S. Byatt, but he is one of Britain's most original and admired writers. His novel Quarantine—about Christ in the desert—was honored as the Whitbread Novel of the Year (1997); Being Dead—which reviews a couple's past life after they have been murdered and their bodies lie decomposing—received the National Book Critics Circle's award (2000). Apparently Crace has always enjoyed narrative challenges: In his first book, Continent (1986), he invented an entirely new geographical region, along with its customs and culture. More impishly, he frequently quotes from plausible, but imaginary, ancient sages (e.g., Mondazy) and occasionally drops in a word that will send the reader to an unabridged dictionary (squill, punnet, secateurs).

In The Devil's Larder Crace recounts 64 very short stories, ranging in length from two words to three pages. All of them involve food in some fashion, and several appear to be set in the same port city. They are, by turns, mildly fantastic, horrifying, witty, enigmatic. The writing is serenely, Nabokovianly accomplished; the imaginative range deeply impressive; and the book, as a whole, just a tad monotonous.

I say this somewhat hesitantly, feeling like a diner who's been given a cordon bleu meal of rare delicacy and has utterly failed to appreciate it. For even while observing Crace's evident artistry, I found myself hungering after something more substantial, more filling and satisfying, than parables and prose poems. The pages of The Devil's Larder all too often felt iron-poor, over-refined. They were twee-told tales, and as such their daintiness could have benefited from a little rough-age—more sex, some real laughs, even a few thrills. Though Crace follows a familiar narrative recipe—theme and variations—and his book possesses a flavor reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities or much of Steven Millhauser (The Barnum Museum, In the Penny Arcade), his bite-sized narratives somehow lack piquancy and zing. Alas, as some readers of Milton or late Henry James know, one may admire a work of literature and still find it dull.

A half-dozen stories from The Devil's Larder do stick in the memory: the one about the grocer who sells out his stock of kumquats by calling them “pygmy oranges”—and then markets his actual oranges as “kingquats”; the prose poem that warns against champagne because it always lets you down: “Nothing is that heavenly or transcendent”; the tale of the Air & Light Restaurant that served absolutely nothing but ambience, grew into the hottest venue in town and then was ruined when it started doing takeaway. In one story a hippie baker wears flour in his hair; in another, we learn why men will drink ocean water and women will drink urine if dying of thirst on the open sea.

All these are charming, in their differing ways, as is this little tale, transcribed—for your delectation—in its entirety:

He kept a curved plate in the middle of his kitchen table, with carvings on its edge. The sun, the moon, some leaves, some stars. It wasn't old or valuable, but it was natural wood, unvarnished and hand decorated. Each day, first thing, once he had done his lifts and bends, he placed his titbits on the plate, food to see off death. Pumpkin seeds to protect the prostate. Bran for bowels. Brazil nuts for their selenium. Dried apricots. French pitted prunes. Linseed. A tomato. There were no supplements or vitamins. He had no confidence in pills. Then he drank his green-leaf tea with honey from the comb. He was a regimented man, well organized, reliable. He kept his diet up, without a break, until the day he died.

So. The syntax and diction are carefully thought out (note the alternation of p and b sounds in the middle sentences). Everyone will recognize this type of obsessive health fanatic. And we grasp the low-key irony of the story's climax: No matter how carefully you eat, you can never live forever. Yet after a while one wearies of such short-shorts and their unemphatic, inconclusive finales: They begin to resemble hothouse blooms, forced into life by sheer authorial will. No doubt a reader of The Devil's Larder should only nibble a page or two at a time, rather than gobbling up the whole book in an afternoon, as I did. That would certainly help, but finally too many of these artful stories will still seem as wispy and insubstantial as a meal from the Air & Light Restaurant.