The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation by Marie Darrieussecq
Susan Ireland

Marie Darrieussecq. Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation. Trans. Linda Coverdale. The New Press, 1997. 151 pp. $18.00.

The publication of Marie Darrieussecq’s unusual first novel, in France, was one of the literary sensations of 1996. An immediate success, the book was soon selling over three thousand copies a day, and the renowned director Jean-Luc Godard is already working on an adaptation for the screen. With characters who metamorphose from human to animal form, this satirical tale suggests a cross between Aesop’s fables and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, while the graphic descriptions of the physical transformations recall scenes from movies like Altered States. At once a sociopolitical fable and a love story, the novel is narrated from a mud puddle by a masseuse in a beauty parlor who has metamorphosed into a pig and whose increased appetite for food and sex leads to a series of bizarre, often farcical, escapades. Her adventures culminate in a liaison with a high-level executive-werewolf; he devours pizza delivery boys while she guzzles the pizza. Meanwhile, in the nightmarish outside world, at some unspecified time in the future, the country has been ravaged by war, epidemics, and famine. Corrupt, racist, right-wing politicians have risen to power and have hypocritically promoted a “healthier” world. In Darrieussecq’s tragicomic exploration of humanity’s animal nature, the chatty, mock-naive style of the unsophisticated narrator pushes every pig pun to its limits, and her deadpan comments on her changing appearance parody those of an adolescent contemplating the onset of puberty. Pig Tales is a striking modern fable by a young writer who has made a dramatic entry onto the literary scene. [Susan Ireland]