[In the following review, Schillinger asserts that the theme of Drakulic's The Taste of a Man is the loss of identity that occurs when a person is consumed by love.]

In her book The Balkan Express, a collection of sensitive and subversive reflections on the war in her native Yugoslavia, Slavenka Drakulic wrote that the worst aspect of war was not its carnage, or its chaos, but its relentless way of alienating people from who they used to be before the war, of estranging them from themselves. Just before Christmas in 1991, in the aftermath of the massacres in Vukovar, the author sat, impassive, in a bath in a Parisian hotel, recollecting brutal photographs of the atrocity, and watching impassively as blood seeped out of a cut in her finger. Squeezing the cut, watching the blood ooze, she wrote:

This body was no longer mine. It had been taken over by something else, taken over by the war. I had thought that the death of the body was the worst thing that could happen in war; I didn't know that worse was the separation of self from the body, the numbness of the inner being, extinction before death, pain before pain.

Now, in the novel The Taste of a Man, her third, Drakulic again explores the terrifying possession that comes when a person is consumed by a larger, inexorable force; this time, love. Again we see a woman in a tiled bathroom at Christmastime, watching blood pinken the water as she struggles to remember who she is. Again we read language, almost in the same words, of the annihilation of self, the usurpation of the body by the other. But this time the blood the woman sees belongs not to herself, but to the man she has murdered—a man she loved, and the man in whom she had invested her identity so wholly that rather than lose him she chose to kill him, cut him up and, in short, eat bits of him, in order to rebuild herself via the grim communion. Drakulic's narrator, Tereza, reflects:

On the surface, that is what I did. I took his life, I killed him. … But that is not at all what this is about: it is about the possibility of prolonging life, about a way of allowing us to stay together. Jose's death was merely a necessary detail, an unavoidable step towards achieving union; a means, not an end.

In other words, to paraphrase My Lai, she had to destroy the union in order to save it. Usually, one would hate to give so much away in a review; but here, Drakulic's relentless foreshadowing, which peekaboos from the dedication page all the way to the bloody end, guarantees that anyone who reads the first five pages cannot possibly doubt the nature of the unappetizing feast that awaits them. At any rate, the point of the book, one guesses, is not so much the story as its telling, and love has precious little to do with it.

There are those who will want to see The Taste of a Man as a straightforward story of obsessive love; and indeed, the book does inhabit the male-female-wife love triangle that has been so convenient to romantic tragedy and comedy immemorially. If you choose to read the book this way, and if you have a fondness for “Fatal Attraction”-type sexual jealousy stories, a thoroughgoing indifference to the psyche of the male character in such a triangle, and a hearty taste for hacksaws, you can be satisfied with the novel on those points alone. Tereza, a Polish graduate student at New York University, falls headlong in love with Jose, a married Brazilian visiting professor, who is at work on a book about cannibalism. A smorgasbord of ghoulish teasers pop out from every corner: The book opens with Tereza fanatically scouring blood out of the floorboards; the couple meets when Tereza, by a “chance happening,” lunges for Jose's copy of Divine Hunger, a book about his pet subject, “the geographic distribution of exo-cannibalism and endo-cannibalism. At the time,” Teresa declares (can we be blamed if we doubt her?), “nothing in the world could have interested me less than a study of cannibalism.” But funnily enough, the subject keeps recurring, at dinner parties, at art exhibitions and wherever else the two of them wander. “At their first tryst they lunch off each other's shoulder blades, Tereza mistaking Jose for a “roast joint” a la Sylvester eyeing Tweetybird, and for small talk, they discuss the manner in which the subjects of the film “Alive!” snacked off slivers of their doomed co-passengers' bodies in order to survive. They love, he dies, she has interior monologue.

Much as Fassbinder's remarkable film The Marriage of Maria Braun served as an allegory of the whorish compromises post-War Germany had to make to ensure its survival, Drakulic's novel serves, one guesses, as an allegory for semi-Post-War Yugoslavia (sic), which continues to devour what it loves—its own people—under the unhealthy illusion that by doing so, it can be restored. As Jose explains to Tereza, describing the consoling grace that allowed the survivors of the “Alive!” crash in the Andes to violate the human flesh taboo. “Up there in those heights there were no obstacles between them and God. The moment they believed that God wanted them to stay alive by eating the corpses of their friends, it all became so simple.” In The Taste of a Man, Drakulic has written a grotesque; a cannibalistic fable that makes love war, and takes no prisoners.