Mammals: A Novel,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 Mrot, in his first English translation, is romantic and dark, with a weakness for the wellturned 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'). Mrot's novel centers on an overeducated, underemployed 40something 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, Mrot's novel invokes the most bitter of chick lit, capturing the pessimism characteristic of the unluckyinlove workinggal heroine: 'The more mediocre the times, the greater the disappointment.' Though it takes some missteps, Mrot'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 thirdperson and more intimate secondperson narration, Merot describes his earlymiddleage subject's chosen professiondrinking, not because he is alone but because he wants to be aloneas 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. Threetosevenbar nights and days at an unfulfilling teaching job occupy most of his 24hour 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