Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

A haunting and powerful novel from one of France’s most exciting and talented young writers.

Animalia

Marion

The exhaustion brought on by the women's new tasks reveals a new image of the world, one in which they appear as free and responsible. For the moment, it is merely a sen-sation, a fleeting, indefinable impression which looms suddenly in the night. In their dreams the men come home from war, but nothing now is the same; an outmoded world seems to have disappeared with them.

 In the gulf opened up by war, morality and common sense will undergo a shift. To kill and to die will be glorious and make heroes of ordinary men. Some credit is always accorded to the dead all the more so if one dies on the front lines. War will carve their names in history long after they have faded from the stone monuments in Puy-Larroque cemetery. Their whole lives will be summed up by a single fact, 'He died a soldier, and there will be nothing else to say.

War rekindles their faltering faith. They believe in God just as they believe in Country. They become devout, and even those in the rear pews feel as though they are fighting a crusade, a Holy War against an Evil that threatens them, the Nation and the Earth. War is the Leviathan that must be defeated once and for all, and they submit to every sacrifice.

They contrive credos and rituals, light endless candles, fashion little amulets and ex-votos, kiss commemorative plaques and medals depicting saints. They become animists, polytheists, necromancers, they pray to the Blessed Virgin, to Saint Antoine, to Jeanne d'Arc and Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux. All that matters is to believe. Soldiers are dying at the front like martyrs on Golgotha, crucified by pieces of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. 

This is how Henri brought up the sons, weighing their character and their masculinity by their capacity to endure the suffering of animals, so that such things now provoke nothing in Joël, except perhaps indifference, a numbness that has gradually extended to everything else, an acid steadily eroding his nerve endings.

Animalia quotes

Join the club