The nasal symphony of Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s Animalia
Animalia is not just about barbarism. It is also about time. Smells become a vector of historical change. When Marcel returns from the war, with a sewn-up eye socket and ruined impression of a face, his experience is contained within his smell: ‘The smell of straw, of animals and sweat has given way to that of alcohol and ether, of morphine and oil of camphor, of stale tobacco and hooch.’ This game of olfactory compare and contrast can be most profitably played between the book’s two halves, when the peasant farmland of 1914 gives way to the intensive mechanized operation of 1981. Before, the fields ‘smell of hay, wild garlic, broom and warm stones’; now, the brothers breathe ‘shallow gulps of ammoniacal emanations’ and ‘the acrid stench of Cresyl [a disinfectant] and slurry’.
Daniel Marc Janes reviews Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo.
Petite vilaine
Yours truly and Susana Medina. Susana’s poem, “Petite vilaine”, appears on p. 460 of We’ll Never Have Paris.