Animalia: A Novel

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 beastThe small village of Puy-Larroque, southwest France, 1898. 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. 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, Éléonore 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 Émile 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.

Literature & Fiction

Del Amo, Jean-Baptiste

Literary

GROVE PRESS

From the author of the "extraordinary" Animalia (Sunday Times), winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, a blazing new novel exploring nature, family, and violence, set on a hostile and glorious mountainside haunted by transgressions of the past. In the soft morning light, a man, a woman, and a child drive beyond the borders of a sleepy post-industrial town into the forested mountains beyond. After several years of absence, the man has reappeared in the life of his wife and their young son, intent on being a family again. He takes them to Les Roches, a dilapidated house in the mountains where he grew up with his own ruthless father, who later died in a fit of alienated mania. There, while the mother watches the passing days with apprehension, the son discovers the bewitching enchantment of nature, from the herds of wild horses who gather under a grove of sycamores to the infinite expanse of a glittering night sky. Although the family is at last reunited, the father exerts a growing hold over the mother and child, dictating the mysterious laws of their new, isolated existence, supported by the provisions he has stockpiled in a locked lean-to. As the weather turns from wondrous spring into the heat of summer and finally to the hostile chill of autumn, the house falls further into disrepair and a return to the mother and son's previous life seems more and more impossible. Intent on keeping the two close, while also haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the father slips into a new kind of madness that only the son will be able to challenge. The winner of the Prix du Roman Fnac in France, and brilliantly translated into English by Frank Wynne, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's The Son of Man is an exceptional novel of nature and wildness that traces how violence is inherited from one generation to the next, and a blistering examination of how families fold together and break apart under duress.

The Son of Man: A Novel

The Son of Man

Genre Fiction

Fitzcarraldo Editions

Animalia

Contemporary

Editeur : Gallimard Date de parution : 2008 Description : In-8, 434 pages, broché, occasion, très bon état. Envois quotidiens du mardi au samedi. Les commandes sont adressées sous enveloppes bulles. Photos supplémentaires de l'ouvrage sur simple demande. Réponses aux questions dans les 12h00. Librairie Le Piano-Livre. Merci. Référence catalogue vendeur: 40898. Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks

Une éducation libertine

Gallimard]

Pornographia

Règne animal

Фоліо

Le fils de l'homme

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