Read about 20 pp. and abandoned. Too graphic and scatalogical for me. Yuk! Unfortunately, I had read a very positive book review in a major publication. Recommended for no one. Premise had sounded interesting but oh well ... ( )

The story of a family in a small French village, stretching from 1898 to 1981. Parts 1 and 2 deal with the early 20th century, and the childhood of Éléonore, living in a small farmhouse with her (unnamed) mother and father, eventually joined by her cousin Marcel. Her father is terminally ill, too sick to look after the farm and their pigs. Parts 3 and 4, set in 1981, see Éléonore now as the matriarch of the family, her son Henri - in a parallel to his father, now terminally ill but hiding it from his family - and younger generations running a pig factory.

This is a fairly brutal life, and the book's descriptions do not shy away from it. In fact, it fairly hits you over the head with it. It's a less than subtle attack on man's relationship to animals, and nature in general. The family business is blighted by an unknown disease, with sows miscarrying and others dying. The pens become rat-infested. Their prize boar - the result of years of a breeding programme - escapes and roams the countryside. Henri becomes obsessed in finding him, in a Moby Dick kind of way. The family is, it turns out, a bunch of misfits, generally all either hiding secrets or involved in some very dubious sexual activity.

It's all rather over-done, for me, especially with the overly obvious metaphor of man interfering in nature, and the escaped Beast being the result, something let loose by mankind's sense of self-importance. The writing, and the translation, is well done, but the themes were just a little too heavy-handed for me. An interesting idea, but just not hitting the mark. ( )