Animalia

July 1, 2019
Carnivores beware. Human and animal misery are evoked in unsparing detail in a dark saga of ruinous husbandry practices. This first novel to appear in English from a prizewinning French author is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Brilliantly, lyrically descriptive whether evoking the natural world or a decaying farmstead, the book traces the terrible evolution of rural ways of life into cruelty and abuse via the history of one unhappy family. Opening in 1898, it evokes peasant existence in Gascony from the perspective of a harshly devout mother, a loving but ill father, and their daughter, Éléonore. Co-existing alongside their livestock, the trio endures a miserable cycle of poverty and endless labor. Marcel, a cousin, arrives to help with the work until World War I intervenes; Marcel survives but at the price of half his face and one eye. In spite of this, Éléonore loves him, marries him, and bears his son, Henri. Swooping forward to 1981, the smallholding has enlarged into a pig production unit, a place of pain and torment. The family has grown via Henri's two sons to include a manic depressive mother, a mute grandson, alcoholism, sickness, and despair of multiple kinds. Meanwhile, outside, a herd of pigs is raised in grotesque, appalling conditions. Del Amo spares no details--indeed overloads the brutish accumulation--in this portrait of filth, cruelty, and moral decline. The people suffer, but the animals suffer more, whether in war- or peacetime. Overmedicated, inbred, and turned into industrial units, the pigs produce contaminated waste that fertilizes the fields that grow the grain they eat, creating a virtuous/vicious cycle of excrement and meat. The piggery has become a cradle of barbarism, and it isn't going to end well. Tortured beasts are tended by soul-destroyed keepers in an unstinting portrait of all that's wrong with modern food production.

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Starred review from July 15, 2019
Del Amo’s pungent, nightmarish English-language debut describes, in a mythic, arresting style, the bleak fates of a cursed family and the pigs they rear. In the first two sections, set in early 20th-century France in the village of Puy-Larroque, a family ekes out a living farming on the “hostile, implacable land.” A stony mother (referred to solely as “the genetrix”) oversees the operations as her ailing husband wastes away and her daughter, Eléonore, chafes against her domineering ways. In the next sections, set in the 1980s, four generations of the family are living on the farm, now a full-blown piggery, described in Del Amo’s unsparing rendering as “the cradle of barbarism and that of the whole world.” The clan is beset with insanity, abuse, terminal illness, alcoholism, depression, incest, and financial ruin. When a giant breeding boar breaks free from its enclosure, Eléonore’s son, Henri, pursues “the Beast”—which comes to symbolize the family’s barely suppressed monstrosity—with Ahab-like vigor. The florid prose has an incantatory power well suited to the festering enmity, inhumanity, and majestic squalor on display. This uncompromising vision will leave readers breathless, thrilled, and exhausted.

August 1, 2019
Award-winning Del Amo's lyrical novel depicting a century on a French family farm emphasizes the earthy and the cruel. Raised by a sickly father and a hardened mother, young �l�onore learns the harsh lessons of farming: the perpetually cold hands, the oppressive weight of the scythe, the destiny of a sow that has developed a taste for its own newborn piglets. Money is tight and even the slightest diversion of resources?a saucer of buttermilk for a stray cat?is pitilessly eliminated. When the Great War comes and �l�onore's beloved cousin Marcel is sent off to the trenches, new forms of brutality are revealed. But it's by no means clear that the disfigurements and scars of war are any worse than that which is continually endured by the farm's livestock. As the century progresses, �l�onore's work on what is now a filthy industrial pig farm accelerates the routine violence. The only hope for nature, perhaps, is an enormous hog they call the Beast. Del Amo artistically and provocatively dissects our conflicted relationship with the rest of the living world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)