Pig Tales - Hardcover

Darrieussecq, Marie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 057119186X ISBN 13: 9780571191864

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1997

Synopsis

Pig Tales is a brilliant first novel about a stunning young woman who lands a prized position at Perfumes Plus, a beauty/massage parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses into a pig. Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and foray for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes. Back at her mother's farm, wallowing in mud and misery, our heroine forces herself at every full moon to regain enough of her human form to tell her incredible story. Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel, a feminist Metamorphosis for the Nineties

About this title

Review:

Franz Kafka meets George Orwell in this dark, dystopian tale. Set in Paris in the near future, the story revolves around a young woman who works as a beautician and masseuse, and for whom happiness is derived from perfumes, shampoos and generally hedonistic pursuits. One day she realizes she is slowly (and quite literally) becoming a pig. Life as a neophyte porker, she discovers, isn't all that bad, though it does contain some unique dangers. She remains extremely popular with her massage customers, who take unusual glee in adopting her barnyard ways. Unfortunately, it is difficult for a pig to find true love in a human world; abandoned by her lover, her days blur into an endless stream of swine-like debauchery. Then she meets Yvan, a young corporate type who sometimes becomes a wolf. Pig Tales, a Prix Goncourt finalist and overnight sensation in France, is Marie Darrieussecq's first book.

About the Author:

Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in Bayonne, France. She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Her debut novel, Pig Tales (1996), was published in 34 countries and became the most popular first novel in France since the 1950s. Her second novel, My Phantom Husband (1998), became an immediate bestseller. Her third novel, Breathing Underwater, prompted Francis Gilbert in The Times to declare that 'there are very few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them'. Her fourth novel, A Brief Stay with the Living, is published in June 2003.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 057119186X
• ISBN 13: 9780571191864
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144