4.0
Animalia
ByPublisher Description
1898: In the small French village of Puy-Larroque, Éléonore is a child living with her father, a pig farmer whose terminal illness leaves him unable to work, and her God-fearing mother, who runs both farm and family with an iron hand. Éléonore passes her childhood with little heat and no running water, sharing a small room with her cousin Marcel, who does most of the physical labor on the farm. When World War I breaks out and the village empties, Éléonore gets a taste of the changes that will transform her world as the twentieth century rolls on.
In the second part of the novel, which takes place in the 1980s, the untamed world of Puy-Larroque seems gone forever. Éléonore has aged into the role of matriarch, and the family is running a large industrial pig farm, where thousands of pigs churn daily through cycles of birth, growth, and death. Moments of sublime beauty and powerful emotion mix with the thoughtless brutality waged against animals that makes the old horrors of death and disease seem like simpler times.
A dramatic and chilling tale of man and beast that recalls the naturalism of writers like Émile Zola,
traverses the twentieth century as it examines man's quest to conquer nature, critiques the legacy of modernity and the transmission of violence from one generation to the next, and questions whether we can hold out hope for redemption in this brutal world.
From a Goncourt Prize winner, this "lyrical novel depicting a century on a French family farm emphasizes the earthy and the cruel [and] provocatively dissects our conflicted relationship with the rest of the living world"
(
).
"[
] invites readers to connect the tangled web of violence, against people and animals—and face the brutality in which all of us are complicit." —
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesAnimalia Reviews
4.0
Kirsty_Koral
Created 7 months agoShare
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“Animalia! This is a book of lyrical, descriptive beauty that tells a story of family, duty, brutality. But what makes this story different is that instead of using the usual tropes (murder, rape, abuse), the author shines a lens on the brutality inherent in the everyday life of five generations of a family of pig farmers. It is an epic book with a scope that covers the years 1898-1981. You live the raw, brutal, violent lives of this family but the violence is often inflicted in silent, melancholic ways. Their lives are described in visceral ways and the book is permeated with manure, shit, piss, blood and death. It oozes from the pages just as it oozes from the characters skin. The explicit and descriptive prose draws you into their world completely and demands your full attention, and because of this it took me almost two weeks to read. It has a deep pull but it’s also quite an uncomfortable world to live in. It’s a silent, almost sensual story where a lot of the story is told through the thoughts and actions of the characters, who due to generations of trauma have forgotten how to communicate with each other. It’s not like anything I have ever read before and it will stay with me for a long time.”D
Created 11 months agoShare
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David Parfitt
Created over 1 year agoShare
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Geoff Walker
Created almost 2 years agoShare
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