2/11/13

Noëlle Revaz - a novel of mud and blood whose linguistic audaciousness is matched only by its brutality, misanthropy, and gallows humor. Narrated by the singular Paul, a violent, narrow-minded farmer whose unceasing labor leaves him with more love for his livestock than his family







Noëlle Revaz, With the Animals, Translated by W. Donald Wilson, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.



Considered the standard-bearer for the great Franco-Swiss literary tradition, exemplified by authors such as Jacques Chessex and C. F. Ramuz, Noëlle Revaz may also remind English-language readers of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: With the Animals, her shocking debut, is a novel of mud and blood whose linguistic audaciousness is matched only by its brutality, misanthropy, and gallows humor. Narrated by the singular Paul—a violent, narrow-minded farmer whose unceasing labor leaves him with more love for his livestock than his family—With the Animals is at once a fantastically exaggerated and entirely honest portrait of masculinity gone mad. With his mute and detested wife and children huddled at his side, Paul is only roused from his regimen of hard labor and casual cruelty when a farmhand, Georges, comes to work on his property for the summer. His sovereignty seemingly threatened, an element of unwanted humanity now injected into his universe, Paul’s little kingdom seems ripe at last for a revolution.


"As Céline invented a shocking, off-kilter urban language, so Revaz recreates peasant speech. A true punch in the face to beautiful prose." - Guy Goffette

Noëlle Revaz masterfully avoids clichés, focusing instead on honest sentiments, love, jealousy, fear of sex and difference, and the will to dominate. Above all, she has created a hybrid style, toying with ruptures . . . transforming adjectives into nouns, inventing circumlocutions that at times seem translated from foreign or ancient languages, but which sing with a poetic rhythm." - Isabel Rüf

"The first pages of With the Animals herald the arrival of a writer, without a doubt, who reacquaints us with words themselves, with rhythms, with color, with contours, with the materials of language." - Jean-Louis Kuffer
  In her debut novel, Swiss author Revaz paints a grim portrait of a provincial farm under the rule of Paul, a petty tyrant who feels more compassion for his cows than he does for his family. Beset by his mute wife (whom he loathingly refers to as "Vulva") and a brood of children, Paul creates a fiefdom of alienation and neverending labor. But the arrival of Georges, a Portuguese farmhand, begins to threaten Paul's authority and undermine his austere worldview. But in the end, the simple episodic plot is of less interest than simply listening to Paul. Full of malapropisms, neologisms, unsettling rhythms and convoluted syntax, Paul's speech creates a vivid and brutal idiolect that is as refreshing as it is disturbing. For all the misanthropy of Paul's thoughts—he often has to struggle to remember that Vulva is a person—he manages moments of minor poetry. Coming across an earthworm, Paul muses that "Some folk never turn a hair but smash straight down with the flat of the spade, and there's some slice clean through and kill with never a thought, never allowing any notion that critters might have stories too, stories just like ours, only we're bigger." Like Paul, this novel has much to offer anyone willing to endure the darkness long enough to find it. - Publishers Weekly

With the Animals, Noelle Revaz’s shocking debut, is a novel of mud and blood whose linguistic audaciousness is matched only by its brutality, misanthropy, and gallows humor which paint a portrait of masculinity gone mad.
Considered the standard-bearer for the great Franco-Swiss literary tradition, exemplified by authors such as Jacques Chessex and C. F. Ramuz, Noëlle Revaz may also remind English-language readers of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: With the Animals, her shocking debut, is a novel of mud and blood whose linguistic audaciousness is matched only by its brutality, misanthropy, and gallows humor. Narrated by the singular Paul—a violent, narrow-minded farmer whose unceasing labor leaves him with more love for his livestock than his family—With the Animals is at once a fantastically exaggerated and entirely honest portrait of masculinity gone mad. With his mute and detested wife and children huddled at his side, Paul is only roused from his regimen of hard labor and casual cruelty when a farmhand, Georges, comes to work on his property for the summer. His sovereignty seemingly threatened, an element of unwanted humanity now injected into his universe, Paul’s little kingdom seems ripe at last for a revolution. - Christopher Higgs

We are beasts: in our desires, in how we move through the world, in how we relate to our environments and the people around us. I am intrigued by fiction in which the line between people and animals is deliberately blurred, in which the façade of human civility is eroded. With the Animals, written by Swiss writer Noëlle Revaz and translated by W. Donald Wilson, is one such book, merciless and unwavering in baring the animal nature of the human race. This is a novel that tells a familiar story — that of a brutal marriage — in a shocking but strangely refreshing manner. You will not find trite melodrama or rehashed themes. With the Animals does not have a traditional sense of plot, diction, or characterization, but the story presented is nonetheless fully and brilliantly realized.
The premise is horrifying and inescapable. A man, Paul, who relates more to animals than to other people, is married. He calls his wife, Vulvia, “that stupid lump of a Vulva.” Paul is brutal, thinking so little of his wife as to try to erase her identity completely. He dismisses the woman she was before she met him and hardly considers the woman she has become to be worth his time and attention. Paul is a man who seems as confused by his wife as he is repulsed by her. The couple also has children, but how many is unclear. The children are mostly an indeterminate mass of youth — the “young ones” Paul calls them, because he cannot be bothered to know their names.
Early in the novel a new farmhand, George, comes to work the farm. At times, Paul welcomes the companionship. At other times he is paranoid George is trying to encroach upon his domain. What we really see is how George is sensitive to Vulvia’s plight and how he attempts to help her. He tries to teach Paul to be a kinder, gentler, and more affectionate husband.
The extent of Paul’s brutality reaches far: to how he speaks to and of his wife; to the way he beats her and rapes her; and to the cruel psychological games or “exercises” he uses to test her. When talking about how he treats his wife, he says:
It’s like the animals: when they’ve seen what a stick is for they think twice before they misbehave, and that’s the way to handle them, giving them to remember and respect the master.
Revaz is unrelenting in what she reveals about this man and this marriage, and the prose takes on a dense and overwhelming, if not suffocating, quality that mirrors what is being conveyed.
And still Revaz makes it possible to feel a certain empathy for Paul, a pity for how small he has made his world and how tightly he needs to control it. He harbors great affection for the cows he tends — unlike his children, he names the cattle, speaks to them, and takes special care to deliver the calves. There are also moments when he remembers his wife’s beauty or has a semblance of a kind thought about her. Paul has a heart even if he is not certain of how to use it.
One of the most intriguing aspects of With the Animals is the narration: both its unreliability and the rough, awkward dialect Paul uses. Even in his diction, Paul is not quite human. This dialect and the inconstancy of the narration obscure as much as they reveal. The narrative style is reminiscent of Emma Donoghue’s Room, and it is only through the main characters’ interactions with others that we get a clearer sense of the dynamics between them, as well as of the gravity of their confined circumstances.
Paul’s outlook is so darkly warped it is hard to know what’s real and what’s a figment of his narrow, repugnant perspective. A doctor comes to visit Vulvia because she has a tumor in her belly. Paul observes:
But Vulva she carries on with the play-acting, digging up vocabulary I’ve no clue where she gets it, and she even puts on a little false pitiful voice: she yarns that her husband never treats her right and she’s had enough on this farm, and she starts up her complaining, but the doctor he goes back to ferreting out about the husband.
Paul is unable to understand that his wife is human: capable of intelligent thought and conversation; capable of desires he has not ordained. Paul struggles with this realization time and again, shaping the novel’s primary tension. Paul grapples with his humanity, his wife’s humanity, and the consequences of being human.
At the end of the novel, Paul and Vulvia sit together. Paul places his hand on his wife’s shoulder. With another couple this could be a tender moment. But in this novel the gesture is not enough. With the Animals is not about a man growing into someone better, even though Revaz compels us to want him to. What makes this novel so remarkable are the fragile, fleeting moments when, despite everything we know, we hope a man can become more than an animal. -

Paul and his wife lead a revoltingly old-fashioned life maintaining the farm that's been in Paul's family for generations. As the owner of the farm and provider to his family, Paul feels it is the pre-ordained duty of his gender to rule the household with priapic, misogynistic strength. His wife is named "Vulva," and although it's unclear if the name is of Paul's doing, it's obvious her presence is appreciated for only a handful of reasons. Despite this unwelcoming premise, Noelle Revaz has created a captivating character study in Paul, and one that takes a surprisingly fresh turn on masculinity and gender studies.

Revaz and her translator both show a revelatory command of language in With The Animals. The book hinges almost entirely on its tone, and Revaz successfully creates a provincial dialect for her narrator Paul that is somehow not condescending but nearly poetic in all its captivating simplicity. Paul is rendered as the basest of manly brutes, and while his boarish and cartoonish way of speaking may seem a fitting gimmick, there's actually much more at work here: through Revaz's finely crafted narration, Paul can be seen actively trying to learn, evolve, and grapple with poignant thoughts just out of reach. To see such a cruel man struggle to express himself almost excuses his actions throughout the novel, and places the reader in a tricky (albeit engaging) position as an onlooker.
Paul's growth lies at the center of With The Animals, but the novel soon begins to feel like a character-study as the book's thin plot flits forward. With the arrival of the farmhand Georges at the beginning of the summer, Paul and his family's simple (and very flawed) lifestyle comes under intense scrutiny in the face of a third party. Just by being present, Georges forces Paul to reflect on his actions and second-guess their appropriateness. Perhaps it's not best to address one's wife as "Vulva," and maybe Georges is being the better man by adding a lyric syllable to her name and calling her "Vulvia". As the summer progresses, Vulva falls ill as something "hard" begins to grow in her belly. What at first seems like a pregnancy blurs into something almost cancerous, which forces Vulva to spend the middle of the novel shut away in the hospital. Paul stays at home with Georges, who politely tries to urge Paul to show some sympathy for his sick wife. Instead, he thinks openly about all the work he can get her started on once she returns. But, deep inside, a spark of empathy and longing seems to glow, even if Paul won't admit it himself:
"It's not I've feelings for Vulva, it's not she means a thing to me: Vulva's no closer to my heart than any other floozy that might have slept at my place, in my double bed, in my farmhouse, and have carried the young ones that is mine too in her womb that I've always kept well supplied. Anyone would be troubled at a familiar presence missing and wanting. Since she's away she's left things off kilter on the farm due to her absence, for it's like if a screw falls out, even a rotten old rusty one, the machine stops working, and on the farm too there's something missing, even though she's of no importance, so you have to get back your grip and your rhythm."
Revaz very carefully paints shadows of infidelity around her novel. Paul grows increasingly suspicious of something secretive growing between Georges and Vulva, and those readers who consider Paul a misunderstood oaf will likely agree that Paul may be turning into a cuckold. Yet, those who find Paul irrevocably repulsive will enjoy watching him writhe. It's a difficult balance but one that Revaz pulls off: with echoes of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Paul is painted in such a way that simultaneously repels and attracts.
There is not much more to With the Animals beyond Paul's growth and the slow revision of his masculine identity. As the novel comes to a close, it becomes creepingly obvious that the rest of the novel's cast were there to simply bring Paul through this development. There's no story here besides Paul's, but what's most important (and most memorable) is how that story is told: Revaz's style more than makes up for what her novel lacks in plot. With the Animals maintains an impressive balance between being aurally repulsive and wildly listenable, and manages to tell a simple but important story in a fresh new way. -

Paul, the narrator and subject of Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals, is a rustic Swiss farmer with strong opinions but a weak intellect; he is a man of formidable emotion but has a rather small heart, metaphorically speaking. The book asks its readers to sustain an intimate encounter with this difficult and often violent man, an intimate encounter because of the way the reader becomes so tightly locked inside Paul’s narrated vision—the story unfolds in his voice and through the representation of his thinking as Revaz has conceived it. Paul’s voice is exceedingly rustic, so much so that at first it seems the book might be set several decades before its initial French-language publication date of 2002. As the story continues, however, it becomes clear that while the story is contemporary, Paul is a living anachronism – out-of-date even by the standards of other neighboring farmers.



Not only is he wary of modern technology—he has trouble using an ordinary landline telephone, for example—and ultra-conservative in his vision of family and society, he is also attached to his farm and to his animals in such a way that he actually sits just outside the usual polarity of city and rural; he is nearly more animal than he is human. And this set-up leads to the central question of With the Animals – can Paul be humanized?



The effort of doing this comes from an exterior force, a summer hire farmhand from Portugal named Jorge, whom Paul immediately renames Georges, “for we’re no foreigners around here,” and Georges’s effort to humanize his boss focuses on Paul’s relationship with his wife Vulva. Yes, her name is Vulva. And this strange name, singularly strange amidst the other more commonplace names in the book, is perhaps Revaz’s most inexplicable choice. There is a moment when a few other farmers ask Paul about his wife’s peculiar name, almost like it might be Paul’s nickname for her, and it may very well be, but Paul’s only explanation is this:



It’s like when they’re born, the way the first time you see their mug the names come into your head and you just say “Blossom” or “Louise” straight off, though you’ve never thought of it before, for it’s the name suits them, and there’s no call to think women come by theirs any other way.



Poor Vulva then—although Revaz does exploit this idea to its fullest, reducing Vulva to little more than a vagina, hips and breasts for most of the book. At least to Paul’s way of thinking. She’s given birth to about six children, with names Paul is unable to remember, and although Paul finds the sex act disgusting, he’s done his duty as her husband when the urge comes upon him.
Noëlle Revaz
In one sense, then, the name is appropriate. It baffles only when one wonders whether Paul would have ever married a woman named Vulva in the first place. Everything about human sexuality disgusts him to such a point that it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have run screaming from their first introduction, and even less possible that he named her thus himself. This aside, Vulva’s name becomes a nearly fantastic element in what is otherwise a completely realist and down-to-earth novel.
That down-to-earth is no exaggeration. Paul’s vision of his life is reduced to the work around the farm and his connection to the land and to his animals. He thinks only of them – and with real tenderness:
I know how to stroke to calm them down and where to pat, and intuitive I find the right word when the wee ones is scared, or when in winter they long in their souls for the open meadows, or are too lazy to shift in their sleep. In my hands there’s a good fluid I’ve had from birth, without me ever trying to find out or explain or understand what goes on in my head, or what they make of it, the cows.
Paul’s easy love for his animals and his difficulty feeling anything but contempt, suspicion and disgust toward Vulva become a focused comparison throughout the story. Revaz sets up two comparative situations—Vulva’s illness, absence, and return versus several small and then one ultimately devastating illness among Paul’s herd of cows. And behind these varying situations is Georges and his work at the farm, his friendship and enmity with Paul. Because Paul can’t quite seem to decide how he feels about Georges, whether he should be suspicious and angry, or grateful and admiring.
Georges, the Latin-tempered, university-educated farmhand with a respectful love of women, is a perfect opposite to Paul, a man stuck in his sexuality-fearing typically Swiss Protestant mold. Where Georges can make lewd but harmless jokes about animals coupling or urge Paul to tell Vulva at the hospital that he misses her, Paul can’t even fantasize about his own wife walking past a doorway in a flimsy nightdress without finishing his imagined vision by smacking her down and insulting her in front of a crowd of people.
The book involves an element of the grotesque that rises up from time to time as a bizarre form of comedy. Paul is so ridiculously out-of-touch, so pathetically calculating and selfish. And so he can only lose, no matter his stubborn violence and wretched attempts to assert his power. Watching his downward spiral would be more thrilling if the reader wasn’t so certain he will cause plenty of damage in his descent. The book isn’t interested in revenge or balance or catharsis – despite a gentle movement in those directions.
If Rousseau, a Swiss writer of an altogether different generation, wanted to convince us of primitive man’s inherent nobility, than Revaz is calling out his theory in the plainest terms. There is nothing ennobling about Paul’s love of dirt and cow shit. Nothing but cruel freedom in his disassociation from other members of his species. But that very challenge makes the book a thoughtful and provocative read. And Revaz’s writing is both daring and defiant.
Finally, a word on this translation as Revaz’s French is not easily transformed. The book’s tight focus on Paul’s thinking, narrated in a very particular Swiss French dialect, and which rolls in a loose stream-of-consciousness style is hard to mimic. And yet, W. Donald Wilson has managed to do so with both precision and careful attention to the music of Revaz’s language. He expertly incorporates the rhythm of Paul’s thought, his strange expressions and often unusual syntax. It’s a beautifully done work, a very satisfying echo of the French original.-
[And, now, just a quick word, a more personal reaction to the book. In W. Donald Wilson’s short Translator’s Note, he comments that With the Animals isn’t written in any particular French dialect, that it was an invention of Revaz’s. Also, Revaz does not name the Swiss canton where Paul has his farm, but it isn’t hard to narrow down the options. First, it’s a French speaking canton: either Valais, Jura, Geneva, Fribourg, or Vaud. We can cross off the Valais as it’s a mountainous region and mostly Catholic, Fribourg is quite Catholic and so is the Jura (and most farming regions of the Jura are up on a high plateau – the beautiful but anarchist Franches Montagnes – that give a very particular farming and community culture). I mention this Catholicism as an excluding factor because I believe that in With the Animals Revaz is really working with a particular Swiss Protestant aesthetic, a bit of Calvinism gone mad, if you will, and so that leaves the cantons of Vaud and Geneva – basically any of the rural communities that dot the hillsides overlooking Lake Geneva.

So I believe, although cannot prove, that the book is set in the canton of Vaud – this is where Revaz currently lives, although I believe she is originally from the Valais. And this is where I live. I live in a small farming community in the canton of Vaud, and I rent a farmhouse from a local farmer. I read the book in French first and then read Wilson’s translation (which is excellent, as I mention in the review at The Rumpus). Much of Revaz’s French felt incredibly familiar to me – the rustic expressions, the cold awkwardness about matters of emotion and physical sensuality, this strange tenderness toward the animals. It’s all worked into the language of the book, and this language is the Swiss French that I’ve come to listen to most often. (Not to mention the one farmer – about Paul’s age – who comes into our local shops still covered in manure, still reeking of spoilt milk and speaks in a patois I cannot understand at all. I see this man at least once every few weeks and now he’s become Paul to me, a pure embodiment of the book.)
So because of all this, I can’t help but disagree with Wilson – Paul’s unique speech is absolutely drenched in this little corner of Switzerland and its rural culture, it’s tension between modernity and traditional Swiss Protestant ethics and aesthetics. And I think it’s a bit of a shame to play that down.] - Michelle Bailat-Jones

In her daring and disturbing first novel, “With the Animals,” Franco-Swiss author Noëlle Revaz takes readers on a journey into the callous, claustrophobic mind of a brute. It’s a tale whose impact can be felt long after the book is closed.
The narrator, Paul, is a farmer who rules his isolated plot like a tyrant, pausing from his work only to batter his cowering wife, whom he refers to only by a crude, objectifying slur. He pays his numerous children little regard, not even bothering to remember their names and only mentioning them when they swarm around him like gnats, howling in terror or cackling devilishly at some indignity he has visited on their mother.
Any sentiment Paul might possess is reserved for his livestock. Even when considering his feelings about his wife, he drifts to thoughts of his cattle, professing that he does understand love; it is when “you have the everlasting fear something bad might occur to damage her about the horns or make you call the vet.” He hires Georges, a Portuguese farmhand, to work with him for the summer, and the two form an uneasy bond as Georges attempts to bring some degree of humanity into Paul’s chaotic, violent dominion.
Revaz has crafted a fascinating and unique argot for Paul, whose terse narration is a stew of malformed words, coarse slang, and awkward constructions. “Before when I go out in the morning,” he begins, “I’ve knocked back a good brimmer already and things fall together like straw.” He’s like a malevolent version of Faulkner’s Benjy Compson, and the blunt, unrefined manner in which he speaks is indicative of the narrow range of emotions he is able to comprehend.
Though his actions are monstrous, Revaz does not cast Paul as purely evil, and this distinction is perhaps the book’s most troubling element. “I do everything by nature,” he says, “just like she made me.” Paul is a misogynist, regularly beats and rapes his wife, and indulges in senseless violence — his only means of exerting control over a world he can barely understand. But his ill-doings are never calculated or premeditated; he acts entirely on impulse as directed by his warped mind, and seems incapable of reflection or forethought. “ ‘It’s not right to call it Love,’ ” he says of his marriage, “ ‘seeing you feel nothing in your soul, just the urge to go at her and let her have it.’ It’s Rage or Fury, we should say, or better just keep our traps shut and say nothing.” To hate such a loathsome creature would be easy; Revaz makes him pitiable in spite of the revulsion he engenders.
At times, a more human Paul seems to reveal itself, as when his wife is away at the hospital for surgery and he gets choked up trying to speak to her over the phone. He is clearly capable of tenderness, as evidenced by his kind treatment of a calving cow in distress. “I’m pleased with you, old girl,” he coos, sweetly. When the summer ends, and it’s time for Georges to depart, it’s unclear whether what little progress has been made will stick. Paul’s malignant, hyper-masculine need for dominance remains, even as he gives small, subtle indications that a more profound change may have occurred.
“With the Animals” is a harrowing tale, and Revaz handles the difficult subject matter bravely, never letting it feel exploitive or gratuitous. Paul’s voice, as difficult as it may be to stomach, is powerful, and the author has succeeded in creating a gripping, visceral story that is meant to be felt as much as it is to be read.

There’s been an unintended similarity between the last few books I’ve reviewed lately. There was the desultory Norumbega Park and its focus on family and property in the suburbs, then the grim Wish You Were Here and its transfer of those themes to a rural English farm. Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals is also rather grim, and also concerns the struggles of a farm family, but it’s utterly unique in its approach, a challenging, harrowing tale that is an incredibly rewarding read, if not an enjoyable one.

The narrator of the story (for he almost certainly cannot be described as a protagonist, or even an anti-hero) is Paul, a Swiss farmer who visits unconscionable violence and brutality on his wife and children. Such explosive means are all he has at his disposal; he seems incapable of processing emotion, showing empathy, or even understanding that the people around him are people. The story is told through his voice, a remarkable construction of slang and malformed words that gives insight into how Paul’s warped mind works (or doesn’t work). Reading in his voice is troubling, as the limitations of his thought begin to feel claustrophobic and oppressive; the roughly-hewn argot creeps into your mind and gums up the works. It’s a testament to Revaz’s skill as a writer and storyteller that she was able to use language in such an effective and disturbing way.
When Paul hires Georges, a Portuguese farmhand, the new arrival attempts to teach his boss some degree of decency and compassion, and their uneasy friendship drives the narrative. With the Animals is an unflinching portrayal of callous masculinity run amok, and Revaz never opts for easy characterization or neat plotting; the ambiguous nature and addled point-of-view of the narrative poses difficult questions to the reader, and I think when most people finish this book, they’ll discover that the book is not finished with them. - Michael Patrick Brady



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