‘Animalia’ by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo      (2016) – 371 pages              Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

‘Son of Man’ by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo was my best read of 2024. His novel ‘Animalia’ is even better. This is a profound well-written novel to read if you can stand the disgusting truth.

Before getting into my review, I want to give you a bit of my background which fits quite closely with this novel. I was born on a dairy farm in Wisconsin where we also kept pigs and chickens.

My mother was the one who chopped off the heads of chickens which we ate for our dinners. She had a real talent for it; she never missed with the axe. After its head was cut off, the chicken would go flying around for a minute or so. As a kid, I could barely stand to watch this. Later I never attempted to chop the head off of a chicken myself, but I ate and still eat a fair amount of chicken. Somebody has to raise them and slaughter them. I figured out quite early on that wasn’t me, and I was no farmer.

‘Animalia’ takes place on a pig farm in southwestern France. Although the setting is rural, ‘Animalia’ is no pastoral. Pigs are birthed, fed, and raised only to be slaughtered in their prime. And the conditions are disgustingly messy. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo captures this all in its revulsion.

But I suspect that Del Amo, like me, is not a vegetarian. The nature of humans is to eat meat.

“If in Animalia the humans behave no better than animals, it is because basically we are animals.” – Ian Sansom, The Guardian

The story in ‘Animalia’ is divided into two time frames. The first are the years before and during World War I from 1898 and 1917. These are the early years of the family pig farm in which the mother of the young girl Éléonore runs the pig farm and their family with an iron hand. The father has some illness and doesn’t help out very much. Even back in those early days the raising and slaughtering of pigs was disgusting enough. When a sow gives birth to a litter, the runts in the litter must be weeded out and disposed. With the father disabled, the mother brings in Éléonore’s cousin Marcel to help on the farm. Éléonore falls in love with him, the one positive thing in her life.

The second time frame is over sixty years later, the year 1981. Éléonore is still on the pig farm, an old woman. Her sons have transformed the family pig farm into an industrial pig farm. At least on the family pig farm, the pigs could run around and make their messes outside. On the industrial farm the pigs are locked up in small pens inside, so they can’t run around and lose valuable weight. This does cause grossly unsanitary conditions inside, and the stench is nearly unbearable.

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

Although, as I said, ‘Animalia’ deals with some quite disgusting truths about pigs as well as the human animals, the writing by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is impressive and profound throughout. This is a deeply felt, deeply imagined novel. ‘Animalia’ recalled for me the ugly naturalism of Emile Zola in Zola’s coal mining novel ‘Germinal’. For me, Del Amo sometimes surpasses Zola in depth.

‘Animalia’ is a novel that can stand proudly up there with the classics of literature.

Grade:    A

‘The Son of Man’ by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo       (2021) – 232 pages            Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

We begin in prehistoric times. A group, a pack, of humans is trudging through the cold forests of presumably northern France.

“For days now, they have been marching westward into the bitter autumn wind. Thick unkempt beards erode the hard features of the men. Ruddy-faced women carry newborns in tattered pelts. Many will die along the way, from the blue bitter cold or from dysentery contracted from stagnant watering holes where the feral herds come to drink. For them the men will dig desolate hollows in the earth. ”

These were grim times for the human animals. While the women spent all their time and effort trying to keep their babies and little children alive, the men murdered animals with their spears for food and built some kind of makeshift shelters to keep them from the bitter cold.

And then ‘The Son of Man’ suddenly switches to modern times, a modern family.

What has caused humans, especially the males of the species, to be so brutal, even today? Inescapably, the answer lies in our brutal primordial past.

Humans are the only species who regularly murder members of their own kind in wars.

‘The Son of Man’ depicts modern-day domestic brutality, the father and the mother and the nine year-old son. The characters do not have names.

The father comes back to his wife and son after being gone for several years for some unexplained reason. He takes them out of the city to his childhood home, Les Roches, so they can start again as a family. But always there is this undercurrent of anger and pent-up violence.

The mother says to the father:

“I just wish you could get past this rage, this shadow constantly hanging over you.”

We see this father and this mother through the eyes of their boy. The boy realizes he must protect his mother from the father’s onslaught.

The story in ‘The Son of Man’ will stay with me for a long time. Here we have modern-day family violence, but its roots are in the prehistoric past. Man’s brutality has been passed down through the ages from primordial times, and none of us are exempt.

I am also excited to soon read the previous novel, ‘Animalia’, by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, since ‘The Son of Man’ has such depth.

Grade:    A