With the Animals
SynopsisPlot
"With the Animals," her shocking debut, is a novel of mud and blood whose linguistic audaciousness is matched only by its brutality, misanthropy, and gallows humor. Narrated by the singular Paul--a violent, narrow minded farmer whose unceasing labor leaves him with more love for his livestock than his family--"With the Animals" is at once a fantastically exaggerated and entirely honest portrait of masculinity gone mad. With his mute and detested wife and children huddled at his side, Paul is only roused from his regimen of hard labor and casual cruelty when a farmhand, Georges, comes to work on his property for the summer. His sovereignty seemingly threatened, an element of unwanted humanity now injected into his universe, Paul's little kingdom seems ripe at last for a revolution.
Story
About this book
With the Animals is the debut novel by Swiss author Noëlle Revaz, written in French and set in a rural farming world of physical labor, mud, and close proximity to livestock. The story is narrated by Paul, a farmer whose entire existence revolves around his animals and land. He treats his wife and children with contempt, barely acknowledging them as people, while lavishing attention on his cattle. His voice is blunt, repetitive, and shaped by the narrowness of his daily routines. The language Revaz gives him mirrors his character: stripped down, coarse, and darkly comic.
Paul's isolated authority over his small domain is disrupted when a farmhand named Georges arrives for the summer. Georges introduces an outside presence into a household that has been sealed off by Paul's rigid control. The tension between Paul's need to dominate and the quiet challenge that Georges represents drives the novel forward. Revaz has been placed in the Franco-Swiss literary tradition alongside figures such as Jacques Chessex and C. F. Ramuz, and her approach to rural masculinity, cruelty, and dark humor has drawn comparisons to Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The novel examines what happens when a closed world is forced open, even slightly.
