Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation

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Her books explore the unspoken and abandoned territories in literature. Her work is dense, marked by a constant renewal of genres and registers. She is published by the French publisher P.O.L.

Marie Darrieussecq – Pig Tales (London, 1998) - Science Comma

My favourite reads are often ones able to converse with thoughts, memories, experiences, feelings found inside my mind, which remained remarkable enough to be granted immortality, never fade. Truismes is a sardonic, tragicomic coming-of-age tale that reeks of fresh authenticity. That said, Darrieussecq’s debut novel had me thinking of two masterpieces - Dogville (Lars von Trier) and Raw (Julia Ducournau). Our unnamed narrator, as Grace in Dogville is not only innocent and naïve, but rather extremely conformist, willing to surrender to all of society’s perversity for as long as it is “humanly” possible. Even so, the novel never falls prey of excessive victimisation or sentimentality, delivering a thorough contemplation of the complexity of female agency in face of a dehumanizing oppression. Julia Ducournau’s films deal with the female body as a reflection of her character’s inner moods, unspeakable truths, unbearable struggles, which transcend the limits of language and, in turn, manifest as body reactions or transformations. Truismes competently follows a similar approach with the fluid transition of our protagonist into a sow (truie in French). This serves to mirror the bestiality with which women are handled in this (sadly realistic) dystopian Paris, while also questioning the human value in face of our ingrained speciesism.The nature of the pig is a major consideration in the choice of the animal into which the protagonist transforms. Pigs are naturally docile animals that are farmed and specifically bred for consumption by humans. Many parallels can be drawn between this and the lifestyle of the sex worker that the protagonist finds herself drawn to. The form of a pig is a stark contrast to the wolf like form that Yvan is transformed into with its predatory connotations.

Pig Tales | The New Press Pig Tales | The New Press

Her first husband was a mathematician and her second is an astrophysicist. Darrieussecq has three children. The pig is particularly significant in respect to Islam as it is one of the meats that are considered Haraam, not fit for consumption by humans. This, when combined with the far-right revolution in the novel that oppresses the Islamic community, enables us to see that one of the fears in the novel is the oppression of such Islamic minorities. France had as recently as 1945 seen the effects of far right politics on the Jewish community (who incidentally also forbid the consumption of pig meat). Darrieussecq's writing is characterized by its precision, concision and clarity; nervous, rhythmic, using an internal prosody, often in octosyllables or in blank verse. Her minimalist style, full of anecdotes and scientific or geographical metaphors, serves a "physical form of writing", [23] close to "writing as sensation", [24] an expression she keyed for Nathalie Sarraute. She either writes short monologues or novels in the third person that focus on the world as a whole, through a group of people from a fictive village called Clèves in south-west France, in the Basque country:Interview with Elisabeth Philippe, «J'adoreraisêtre reprise par Beyoncé», L'Obs, 30th of October, 2017 In 2013, she was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes ( Men, A Novel of Cinema & Desire). In 2019, she held the biannual Writer-in-Residence's Chair at Sciences Po in Paris. Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, «Non,Marie Darrieussecq n'a pas piraté Camille Laurens», Le Monde, 30 août 2007 In 2014, she participated in Passés par la case prison (Served a prison sentence) and became Patron of the Observatoire des prisons. [11] In 1986, she passed the Baccalauréat in French Literature in Bayonne. After a two-year preparatory course (Hypokhâgne and Khâgne) in literature at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux and the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand in Paris, she studied at the École Normale Supérieure de la Rue d'Ulm in Paris from 1990 to 1994, followed by the Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 1992, she passed her aggregation in Modern Literature, coming sixth. [1]