Animalia - by Jean-Baptiste del Amo (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This "lyrically descriptive [novel] traces the terrible evolution of rural ways of life into cruelty and abuse via the history of one unhappy family." (Kirkus Reviews)

1898: In the small French village of Puy-Larroque, Éléeacute;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. 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, 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.

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" ( Booklist).

"[Animalia] invites readers to connect the tangled web of violence, against people and animals-and face the brutality in which all of us are complicit." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Review Quotes

Praise for Animalia:

Winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction
Finalist for the Best Translated Book Award
Shortlisted for the Albertine Prize
Longlisted for the Believer Book Award

"Animalia is never what you expect it to be . . . Del Amo has Flaubert's flair for performance . . . His prose leaps out at the reader, gleaming with perfection."-Ankita Chakraborty, New York Times Book Review

"Colorfully misanthropic . . . Del Amo concentrates on the brute physical aspects of life on the farm, describing with stomach-turning flamboyance the slimy, spurting realities of breeding, birthing, castration, and culling . . . All submit to the forces of decomposition, which the author dwells upon in lavish detail."--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"A lyrical powerhouse, a sophisticated portrait of a fucked-up feedback loop of familial cruelty and disappointment, and a story that, for all its brutality, also reveals something more . . . There is wickedness enough for this book to stand alongside Cormac McCarthy's meanest, but the brief moments when these beleaguered characters show their humanity and kindness--delivering a calf, bathing a mother--left me breathless."--Emily Nemens, Paris Review

"Brutally gorgeous . . . Monstrosity abounds in this rancid, shit-smeared book, yet it is rendered with beautiful, almost Miltonian descriptions of the fallen world--a world that fell a long time ago."--Hunter Braithwaite, Guernica

"Mr. Del Amo's intensely visual, sensory writing brings to life the physicality of a factory farm: the blood, mucus, gore and excrement are animated, as though characters at war with the human drive to turn animals into disembodied machines . . . Mr. Del Amo's immersive prose imagines what it is like to try to handle these farms . . . By linking the horrors of past and present, Del Amo tells a story of how modernity has industrialized and optimized human cruelty . . . [Animalia] invites readers to connect the tangled web of violence, against people and animals--and face the brutality in which all of us are complicit."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Arresting . . . The book churns with intense sensory descriptions of the smells and sights that signal death and birth and endure through the decades . . . Del Amo's Puy-Larroque oppresses and destroys the family who inherited it, but it's a thrilling jolt of life to a reader who encounters it from afar. The writing appears effortless yet impossible to emulate, as if Del Amo were tuned in to a secret channel connecting him to words straight from the earth."--Orion Magazine

"Rarely does a book stimulate all the senses to such an extent . . . Reading Animalia, a novel filled with flesh, sex, and blood, is not for the faint of heart . . . With a vision that flies in the face of our sterilized, overly hygienic society, which turns a blind eye to death, he reveals the wild side of humanity, for better or for worse."--France-Améeacute;rique

"Powerful . . . This is not a novel that says just try to recycle a bit more: it is a book that confronts a reader with a stark moral reckoning of the costs of eating meat. There are characters too, but the main character, here, troubled and chased through these pages, is the farm. Fans of Édouard Louis will find a thrilling fellow-traveler here."--John Freeman, Literary Hub

"A marvelous novel in the naturalistic mode that explores how the lives of humans and animals are both interdependent and in conflict . . . [Del Amo's] prose is stunning from the first page on; no sm

About the Author

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is one of France's most exciting and ambitious young writers. He is the author of Pornographia, Le sel, and Une éducation libertine, which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. Animalia, his fourth novel, is his first to appear in English.

Frank Wynne has translated works by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Pierre Lemaitre, Javier Cercas, and Virginie Despentes.