ABSTRACT
Tanning is economical in her use of a single piece of petrified dough to summon powerful meaning – the “best thing since sliced bread”? The title is loaded – idiomatic and wicked in its irony. Victory suggests something glorious, when, in reality, burning one’s toast feels like more of an accident. There is a surreal slippage at work which evokes both the chance encounter and the marvellous within the everyday. It is a contemporary surrealist object and a readymade heirloom – definitions which might also apply to Tanning’s novel.
