No-one here will get through life without losing a limb, an eye, a child or a spouse, a piece of flesh, and Éléonore feels the thick, calloused skin of her knees, her elbows, brushing against the fabric of her dress, of her blouse. Even the children seem only to remain children for the blink of an eye. They come into the world like livestock, scrabble in the dust in search of meagre sustenance, and die in miserable solitude. They dance to the sound of a squeaky fiddle to forget that they were dead before they were born, and the alcohol, the music and the sarabande lulls them into a gentle trance, the impression of life.
This multiple award-winning novel by French author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo knocked it out of the park for me. Animalia touches on the lives of five generations of a rural French farming family, and even as that family enters the modern world, removing itself ever further from a harmony with nature, its members become increasingly more brutal and beastly. It’s true that Del Amo was inspired to write this novel after visiting a factory farm (and witnessing horrific animal abuses there), but he has said that Animalia is “a pure work of fiction and not a thesis or activist writing. It is a novel that appears to me to speak more about the human condition than the condition of animals.” A domestic epic, social commentary on the twentieth century, a deep dive into the nature of humanity and how we are formed by our families: this novel has everything that I personally admire in a work of literature. And with compelling characters, explosive sentences (all respect for the translator, Frank Wynne), and consistently wrenching plot points, this is a well-imagined, well-written, and well-constructed novel by any measure. Absolutely highest rating.
We need to scrabble in the mud of memory, the silt of this family tree, to drag into the light of day the roots I’m telling you about, roots as difficult to rip out as broom — and what does it matter now whether the blame lies with me or with others who came before us? I am the one who is here now today prepared to explain, to answer for our actions. Not that I am expecting absolution, not that I expect your forgiveness or even your compassions, but simply because it is the least I can do: to try, always assuming it is possible, to piece together the story, our story, and therefore yours, for you, who has not asked anything and yet whose life and whose actions are guided by some invisible hand — why not call it fate, since everything had been decided for you — to try to reconstruct that collective memory, instilled in each of us and yet elusive and illusory.
As Animalia begins, Éléonore is a five year old girl, living on a subsistence farm with her cold, severe mother and a hard-working father (with whom she hasn’t exchanged a hundred words in her entire life, but adores all the same); Éléonore doesn’t understand that her father is wasting slowly from a disease of the lungs. Éléonore does her chores obediently — enjoys taking the brood sow into the forest to snuffle for acorns — and the chores follow the rhythm of the seasons, in harmony with nature, year after year. Her father eventually brings a slightly older cousin, Marcel, to help him work the farm — naturally, a crush ensues — and the story to this point could have been set at any time over the past many centuries until one day Éléonore and Marcel look up and marvel at the aeroplanes and airships passing overhead. Soon, Marcel is conscripted into WWI and the news that Éléonore hears from the front is of the inhuman industrialised horrorshow that combat has become, and this anticipates what the family’s farm will eventually turn into.
In the second half, set in 1981, Éléonore is the detached and sidelined matriarch of the family, with her son and two adult grandsons running a large-scale “piggery”; and while the operation looks modern and efficient, farmwork is as back-breaking as ever (with the unending feeding, assisted breeding, and the sluicing out of excreta discharged by thousands of confined hogs), but now totally disconnected from the natural rhythms of the land and its seasons. You can see habits and quirks passed down through the generations, but a propensity for violence and a failure to communicate are this family’s true patrimony. Even so: Éléonore has a mute great-grandson — aloof to the influences of the hard men and disengaged women around him — who still delights, as she once did, in walking in the woods; in being one with nature. The storyline truly does feel epic and it comes to a realistic ending, with a satisfyingly supported thesis:
This coldness, this hard-won indifference to the animals, has never quite managed to stifle in Joël a confused loathing that cannot be put into words, the impression — and, as he grew, the conviction — that there is a glitch: one in which pig rearing is at the heart of some much greater disturbance beyond his comprehension, like some machine that is unpredictable, out of kilter, by its nature uncontrollable, whose misaligned cogs are crushing them, spilling out into their lives, beyond their borders; the piggery as the cradle of their barbarism and that of the whole world.
This is a book with a lot of charged material in it — abuses, war, bodily wastes, alcoholism, mental illness — but nothing is gratuitous and it is all written in brain-firing, incandescent prose: this is what we have become as humans and we do well to acknowledge it.
I'll add here: I read this because I recently finished an ARC of Del Amo's upcoming release (The Son of Man), and the two books seem very related; they certainly cover the same theme of violence being passed down within families. And I want to note that I had a problem with the formaility of the language in The Son of Man, but didn't have the same problem for this book, maybe because of the historical setting? I especially didn't like the use of the word "genetrix" in that book (it seemed a pointless synonym for an unnamed mother), but it is used well in Animalia to describe Éléonore's severe mother (and especially as she is eventually renamed "the widow" and then "the grandmother" as her circumstances change.) All this to say: I would have appreciated The Son of Man even better had I read Animalia first and recognised its place in a body of work (I know there's something to that novel having a family property called "Les Roches" and the family farm here being named "Les Plaines"; perhaps there are more books to the series.)
