Mammals [Paperback]

Pierre Merot (Author), Frank Wynne (Translator)

Book Description

One of the most internationally noteworthy titles from Europe in recent years, Mammals is a witty anatomization of modern life. Caustic, comic, and unflinchingly honest, Mammals is a cruel but beautiful tale of love, solitude, alcoholism, family, and unemployment. This fictional memoir of a glorious loser recounts the life of the Uncle, an unhappy Parisian bachelor whose only true loves were a Polish girl and a divorcee. He is a drunk; he is sarcastic; he works and fails desultorily in several fields until he winds up surrounded by neurotic women, a teacher in a secondary school. He tries out therapist after therapist and can't figure out who is the butt of the joke. He has nephews and this makes him nervous. In fact, almost everything about family life makes him nervous — especially now that he's living at home again. He coins proverbs for living with lowered expectations and attempts a bestiary of his pathological parents, the mammals of the title.

Riding its handbasket merrily to hell, veering now and then toward overwhelming lyricism, Mammals pieces together the portrait of modern society's Everyman. It establishes Pierre Merot as an extraordinary and delightful voice of international stature.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mérot, in his first English translation, is romantic and dark, with a weakness for the well-turned paradox ("Psychoanalysis teaches you one vital lesson: it teaches you that seeing a psychoanalyst is pointless...") and the surrealistic metaphor (coming into Poland in the winter, the protagonist sees "snow with white vodka claws"). Mérot's novel centers on an overeducated, underemployed 40-something man known as "the uncle," for his role as the black sheep of a model family. The story line strings together the uncle's life in episodes involving alcoholism (eight pints per evening and counting), marriage (unsuccessful), cohabitation (with a woman reminiscent of his childhood fantasy, Cruella de Ville), odd jobs (in various contemptable venues, including "Walt Disney College"), and the sadness of ending up at 40 with a small apartment and a large belly. While the protagonist is a man, Mérot's novel invokes the most bitter of chick lit, capturing the pessimism characteristic of the unlucky-in-love working-gal heroine: "The more mediocre the times, the greater the disappointment." Though it takes some missteps, Mérot's American debut should please casual fiction readers and Francophiles alike. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

The Uncle is Merot's subject, and that's a scientific term, since Merot presents the Uncle as modern European Everyman to be studied under a microscope and reported on dispassionately, though with all attendant horror and humor. Seamlessly alternating between distanced third-person and more intimate second-person narration, Merot describes his early-middle-age subject's chosen profession--drinking, not because he is alone but because he wants to be alone--as the exhibitionism of an "accomplished martyr," whose habitat, described in detail, is the bar, to which he goes because, like other alcoholics, he feels terrible but is certain that others there feel worse. Three-to-seven-bar nights and days at an unfulfilling teaching job occupy most of his 24-hour cycles of exhausted ennui. He also sees a psychiatrist who incants about beaches until he lulls himself, not the Uncle, to sleep. Absurdist humor illumines this existential "river of urban adventures" in drinking, loving, and living that all amount to "the same magnificent bullshit" in a great age of mediocrity. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184195893X
• ISBN-13: 978-1841958934
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely disjointed, May 18, 2009

By 

silverdragonfly (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mammals: A Novel (Paperback)

Recommended. As with a lot of good modern literature, "Mammals" aims to drag you into full view of the disjointed nature of modern man, case represented by "the uncle". Contrary to the previous reviewer I think this is the book's merit. The uncle's very sarcastic nature appealed to my literary tastes. I first read this book in 2003, at age 23. I liked it ever since. I don't particularly like writing reviews but I had to defend this novel in the light of the other review.
You can read the synopsis and get a glimpse of the writing itself even without my help. I won't bother with that. I would recommend this book though. Some other books I grouped Mammals with on my bookshelf are: A Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley; The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery; and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Huh?, August 26, 2006

By 

Andrew Fairley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mammals: A Novel (Paperback)

I picked this one up because Niall Griffiths (my fav author) wrote a blurb for it. Now maybe it's because I'm not in my 40s, and maybe it's because of the translation, but I just don't get it. There were only a couple times I thought it was particularly funny, and the narration was continually disjoint and weird. It's awkward when someone refers to themself in the third person once, and in this case throughout the book the narrator refers to himself as "the uncle." I just didn't get it.