Edinburgh Napier University

  The title of Jonah Campbell’s blog, from which the short essays collected in Food & Trembling have been adapted, is Still Crapulent After All These Years. It is a fitting title, and not only because Campbell’s forays into writing about food more often than not concern excess of the vomiting-in-the-gutter-variety, but also, and perhaps even more appropriately, because the adjective perfectly describes his somewhat overwritten and often self-indulgent prose. The choice of the word, in fact, is indicative of Campbell’s approach in many of these essays: beginning with a slightly obscure or heavily specialized word, of the kind that is richly suggestive (crap? opulent? flatulence?), he spirals through a self-consciously unscientific combination of etymology and random associations before settling on a memory of a thing eaten and perhaps adding a few lightly philosophical observations before ending the three-page exploration with a humourous and noncommittal one-liner meant to deflate the pomposity of his most ornate stylistic flourishes. But while Campbell’s verbose prose can at times be both tiresome and obfuscating in Food & Trembling’s book-length dose, it is also the main reason for the book’s often considerable charms, and one gets the feeling that food is merely incidental to his real subject: the sensuous pleasures of language, and especially of esoteric vocabulary, interminable sentences, and digressive footnotes.