Countless authors have confronted the idea of Western overÂindulgence by making their characters as self-Âindulgent as their enemies. Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby is disillusioned by the old money of prohibition-era New York while still lavishing in its excesses. Holden Caulfield deals with society's many disappointments by skulking in self-pity. Few characters have successfully separated themselves from the self-satisfaction they swear they hate. Claude Tardat, a French writer who has apparently vanished since the original publication of her book in the 1980s (this edition was translated late last year), has given us a nameless narrator in A Sweet Death with the self-awareness to embody her disgust with Western overindulgence. She becomes consumptive on her own terms.
She is the 19-year-old daughter of a wealthy diplomat father and a dilettante mother, and like any angsty teenager, she hates her privilege. But she knows that self-pity is more indulgent even than her parents' high-society friends. So wandering alone in Paris—perhaps the most indulgent city in the world—she exhibits an autonomy that American narrators could never achieve: Instead of moping around and hating her world, she decides to eat herself to death.
In A Sweet Death, we read the journal entries from the last few weeks of her life as she combats her privileged upbringing by killing herself with it. This is not a novel about a girl with an eating disorder. Although she hates her "swollen" body, she loves the reaction it gets; people on the street are disgusted by her, and she revels in their repulsion. She's picky about what she eats—at some point early on, she began connecting the olfactory sensations of her mother's perfumes and makeup with those of the pastries of Paris, and so she only consumes the best pastries that high society has to offer—and eats without any remorse.
Ironically, the language itself is indulgent. "Why do they get so worked up about it just because the skies are clear and the sun is out?" she asks while observing young hotties scantily clad on a hot day. But, characteristically unable to stop and let the question and the inevitable answer gain a footing, she continues, "Exhibiting all that skin, forgetting that the skin is just a husk holding in a soggy, sticky mass? Congregating in a mess of erotic magma?" Although it's appropriately melodramatic for a 19-year-old girl, it only works to relieve the narrator of any credibility. Often, the flowery language and overly specific adjectives remind the reader just how frustrating it is to see a privileged teenage girl die from too much food when so many are dying from lack thereof. The theatrical narration can come only from a girl who is trying to hide the fact that what she's really saying is, "See? See what you made me do?" 
