Name: Animalia
ISBN: 9781925774573

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

A haunting and powerful novel from one of France’s most exciting and talented young writers.

Animalia

Marion

The exhaustion brought on by the women's new tasks reveals a new image of the world, one in which they appear as free and responsible. For the moment, it is merely a sen-sation, a fleeting, indefinable impression which looms suddenly in the night. In their dreams the men come home from war, but nothing now is the same; an outmoded world seems to have disappeared with them.

 In the gulf opened up by war, morality and common sense will undergo a shift. To kill and to die will be glorious and make heroes of ordinary men. Some credit is always accorded to the dead all the more so if one dies on the front lines. War will carve their names in history long after they have faded from the stone monuments in Puy-Larroque cemetery. Their whole lives will be summed up by a single fact, 'He died a soldier, and there will be nothing else to say.

War rekindles their faltering faith. They believe in God just as they believe in Country. They become devout, and even those in the rear pews feel as though they are fighting a crusade, a Holy War against an Evil that threatens them, the Nation and the Earth. War is the Leviathan that must be defeated once and for all, and they submit to every sacrifice.

They contrive credos and rituals, light endless candles, fashion little amulets and ex-votos, kiss commemorative plaques and medals depicting saints. They become animists, polytheists, necromancers, they pray to the Blessed Virgin, to Saint Antoine, to Jeanne d'Arc and Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux. All that matters is to believe. Soldiers are dying at the front like martyrs on Golgotha, crucified by pieces of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. 

This is how Henri brought up the sons, weighing their character and their masculinity by their capacity to endure the suffering of animals, so that such things now provoke nothing in Joël, except perhaps indifference, a numbness that has gradually extended to everything else, an acid steadily eroding his nerve endings.

A prizewinning and word of mouth literary sensation in France,Animalia is an extraordinary epic that retraces the history of a modest French peasant family over the twentieth century as they develop their small plot of land into an industrial pig farm, a visceral, chilling tale of man and beast The small village of Puy-Larroque, southwest France, 1898. Ã%lÃ©onore 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. Ã%lÃ©onore 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, Ã%lÃ©onore gets a taste of the changes that will transform her world as the twentieth-century rolls on. As the reader moves into the second part of the novel, which takes place in the 1980s, the untamed world of Puy-Larroque seems gone forever. Now, Ã%lÃ©onore has herself 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 Ã%mile Zola,Animalia 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.

This is a brilliant book with great prose and writing. This is the first book I’ve read about the relationships between humans and animals. Jean-Baptiste writes about a peasant farming family living on a farm and follows their life on this farm over generations. A common theme through the book is violence and cruelty in the family and to animals, over time this cruelty is optimized with modernity. Essential reading for moral reckoning with our consumption of meat and how that affects not just our natural environment but our own humanity.

“Occasionally Joël wonders whether it was the piggery that made monsters of them, or their monstrousness that infected the farm.”

This is a brilliant book with great prose and writing. This is the first book I’ve read about the relationships between humans and animals. Jean-Baptiste writes about a peasant farming family living on a farm and follows their life on this farm over generations. A common theme through the book is violence and cruelty in the family and to animals, over time this cruelty is optimized with modernity. Essential reading for moral reckoning with our consumption of meat and how that affects not just our natural environment but our own humanity.

“Occasionally Joël wonders whether it was the piggery that made monsters of them, or their monstrousness that infected the farm.”

Barış Yarsel

Fransa'da temaşa yarattı, lakin ingilizcesiyle hemhal olabildim.
Önce giriş kısmını okumuştum, bariz Laszlo Krasznahorkai üslubu olduğunu düşününce devam ettim. Taşrada sefalet içinde yaşayan bir ailenin 4 nesil öyküsü.

hacimli kitap, fransızlar genelde büyük fontlarla basarlar, ingilizcesi her bölümü 100 sayfadan 400 sayfa üzerine kurulmuş. özellikle ilk iki bölümde her bir cümlesi çok güzel işlenmiş. insanın insanla, doğayla, hayvanlarla teması, şiddet, pislik, sefillik.

son iki bölümde, yakın zamanlara gelindiğinde metnin şiddeti azalmasa da, cümlelerde sarsaklıklar beliriyor. neden uzadığı anlaşılamayan paragraflar geliyor. savaştan çıkmış karakterlerin eve dönüşleri, fransızların etkisi hala görülen toplumsal travmasının bir ailede odaklanması.

kuşaklarda bireyler birbirlerinin yerlerini alırken domuz çiftliğinin mıh gibi durup buram buram tasvir edilen çürümüş et kokusunun baki kalması. avrupalılarda o kalın katman halindeki davranış kurallarının altında kalmış, ama nadir de olsa görünür olan barbarlığı anlatıyor.

Marisel 

If you’re looking for an uplifting, happy read, this isn’t it. This is a very smart book, gorgeously crafted and as addictive as it is violent. There is nothing redeeming in the story of the humans and animals of this small French farm. The story follows the descendants for a span of approximately nine decades through socio-political changes and leading up to the burgeoning industrial development of the farm during the latter part of the 20th century. It pits humans and beasts, while weighing the differences against the commonalities of their nature. I’m assuming that this English translation from the original French is reliable enough, but several times I was unexpectedly halted by some awkwardly put phrase, some archaic word or some small misuse of a term, reminding me that this was a translation . I found these distractions a bit bothersome, but not significantly annoying in any way as to detract from the otherwise beautiful writing. Questions about human judgement and moral construct abound. This is a hefty, meaty (unintended but accurate pun!) undertaking, not for the faint of heart.

Animalia

Reviews

Highlights