This is my first time reading Jean-Baptiste Del Amo…..
I purchased “Animalia” ……(for which the author won the Prix du Livre award), and plan to read it too.

French author, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo was born in 1981….(same year as our oldest daughter)….
Having just finished reading “The Son of Man”, the first word that comes to mind is *unparallel*. …..as this book is exquisitely *unparallel* in prose, in story, in darkness, sadness, bleakness, braveness and boldness.

What type of man leaves his wife and his young son for six years, then comes back as though he’s the boss? Then teaches his son how to shoot - how to kill — and tells his son to never fall in love….(that love is a disease, a virus; it eats away at you like a gangrene)?

The father had been away from his son and wife for six years - but he tells his son he is back to stay and will never separate again. The father hopes and plans to win his son’s love again. His distant wife too.
The father smokes Marlboros …. a lot.

The mother ….. shhhh …. is pregnant (right > by another man)….

“The child learns to live in the shadow of his mother’s pain: over time, his movements grow slower and more wary, his games are whispered in the half-light of his bedroom. He is constantly listening for her every movement, her body turning over in bed, her cries, her groans”.
The son learned at an early age to shower, dress, and cook for himself, as his mother’s pain - from migraines were so terrible she felt like banging her head against the wall— or that she would rather be dead.

The son was so sweet - (I loved him - and my heart broke for him)……he had way too much adult responsibility-
He promises never to leave his mother - he wants to help her - care for her needs. (at the cost of his own lost innocent childhood).
His mother loved him….(we feel this):
“ My little redhead, she said, my little Fox cub”.
(but we also feel how it’s not enough for she or her son).

His mother kept tarot cards in a drawer next to her bed. She was happy when she drew a card of strength— but when she drew a card of death… she sometimes put it back and drew another card.
The Lovers card excited her the most. She dreamed of meeting a man who would love her the way her father did.
She would rather have almost any man other than the kind that left her alone to cope with a child.

From Mother …..her input about her husband: (women really are the wiser sex)….
“What he really wanted was to live dangerously, says the mother, there was nothing he liked better than to tempt fate. It was his idea of freedom, his idea, independence; in the end, maybe he wanted to wage war on life itself—the town had only been a backdrop and collateral damage for his revenge—to make up for the time he felt he had lost up in the mountains, under the strict, suffocating authority of his progenitor”.

As I read this novel …..I was soooo impressed with the quality of writing….unbelievable!……
……and those ‘visuals’ throughout— so descriptive- violent and tragic - were staggering and astonishing.

A few powerful excerpts….
“For days now, they have been marching westward, into the biting autumn wind. Thick unkept 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, with their gnarled fingers or their blades, will dig desolate hollows in the earth”.

“The threnody brings with it a torrent of images of sensations, and deep within their flesh, all gathered here, feel a profound melancholy, one that speaks of their wanderings over the earth, aimless and devoid of all meaning, of the endless cycle of the seasons, of the dead
who continue to travel by their sides and our conjured in the anteroom of night by a furtive shadow or the howl of a wolf”.

“Before long, their reserves run out. They feed on nuts, on acorns, that they crush, and boil again, and again to remove the tannins before mounding them into biscuits and cooking them over coals”.

The ending might leave readers either feeling intoxicated….or wishing to be.

Congrats to Jean-Baptiste du Amo …..(I’ve another book of his to read) ….
And thanks to Grove Atlantic….( they are the very best!)