For the benighted characters of Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s powerful novel Animalia, that legacy seems as unlikely to change as the movement of the seasons in a novel which – like those of Larkin’s literary hero Thomas Hardy – is imbued with nature and the inevitability of death. The first two bring us from 1898 to 1917 on a farm in a remote region of France. One character is present throughout the novel, Eléonore, who we first meet as a child, unusually quiet and always seeking the whisper of human warmth she receives from her father. Eléonore “quickly learns to emulate her in her tasks . But with Marcel – though he is as taciturn as everyone else in the novel – comes the possibility to imagine.

Source: The Irish Times March 23, 2019 06:01 UTC