Mammals - Softcover
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.
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Review:
"An audacious burlesque ... Merot is a fine writer, brilliant, witty and with an unusual sense of mercy for the least fortunate in the urban fauna. ... Mammals is an exceptional novel, of many bars, much barcrawling, many long nights, insatiably thirsty drunks and lives gone off the rails."
From the Back Cover:
"Every family should have a fuck-up: a family without a fuck-up is not truly a family..."
So begins the story of Uncle, one of life's most unsuccessful underachievers. Ground down by a run of futile jobs and his mother's tireless disapproval, Uncle considers, with a little help from drink, women and good books, what life might really have to offer a man in his prime.
'Fasten your seat-belts, this will blow you away.' Lire
'Made me laugh and cry simultaneously, which made my face look very strange, but my brain, my soul, and my heart very happy.' Frédéric Beigbeder, author of Windows on the World
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherGrove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0802170196
- ISBN 13 9780802170194
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages208
- Rating
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Mammals: A Novel
Published by
Grove Press, Black Cat
(2006)
ISBN 10: 0802170196
ISBN 13: 9780802170194
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Softcover
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Book Description Softcover. Condition: new. Product 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. From Publishers Weekly M?rot, 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"). M?rot'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, M?rot'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, M?rot'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. 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 ScottCopyright American Library Association. All rights reserved. Seller Inventory # DADAX0802170196
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