"Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation" by Marie Darrieussecq *****

• Summer book with Beth
• French author
• Debut novel
• Originally published in 1996
• Epigraph:  "Then the knife plunges in.  The farmhand gives it two little shoves to push it through the thick skin, after which the long blade seems to melt through the neck fat as it sinks in up to the hilt.  At first the boar doesn't understand a thing, he remains stretched out for a few seconds, thinking about it.  Aha!  Then he realizes he is being killed and utters strangled cries until he can scream no more."  -- Knut Hamsun
• Vocabulary:
• pipistrelles:  any of numerous insectivorous bats of the genus Pipistrellus, especiallyP. pipistrellus of Europe and Asia.
• autarky:  the condition of self-sufficiency, especially economic, as applied to a nation
• Setting:  France.....sometime
• Quotes:
• p.43..."But with the best will in the world I couldn't have gone back to being the same person I had been."...so true...once eyes are opened they cannot be shut
• p.76..."The dreams of birds were everywhere in the warm shadows of the trees, and the dreams of pipistrels were everywhere in the sky, because pipistrels dream even when awake."
• p.99..."And then he said that the iniquitous intellocratic, capitalistic, multi-ethnic regime had given the Nobel Prize or whatever to this Knut character, which was indisputable proof of subversion."
• p.151...."I write whenever my animal spirits subside a little.  The mood comes over me when the Moon rises, and I reread my notebook in its cold light.  I try to do what Yvan taught me, but for the opposite reason:  when I crane my neck toward the Moon, it's to show, once again, a human face."
• Notes:
• author picks on all gender, ethnic, and political groups
• Reference to Knut Hamsun....a contemporary writer, I just read "Hunger".....fantastic
• Review:  A woman transforms in and out of pighood?  Seriously?  Believe it or not this works!  This is a fast-paced, visionary and satiric look at politics, gender, and the role of sex in both.  I laughed, I cringed, and I couldn't put it down.  The author points her sharply attuned literary finger at both genders, all forms of government and spares no one.  Perhaps the point is that we as humans are all capable of both good and bad. The form of our lives becomes a question of which side prevails, and how much it is within the control of the individual versus within the domain of ethnicity and/or social class.  Ms. Darrieussecq packed quite a bit into a short novel.  Well done!