Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq

This novel succeeds in becoming both hilarious and sinister, a piece of social commentary disguised as an exercise in WTF. It begins with the story of an unemployed girl who gets hired in an exclusive Parisian perfume store by giving sexual favors to the shop director. She is then subjected to various acts of perversion by the boutique’s customers, all the while earning a pittance to support herself and her abusive boyfriend. Sounds like your typical “women are objectified and commodified in a consumerist society” novel so far. Then she turns into a pig.

No, really, the girl physically transforms into a pig.

Actually, writing a review for Pig Tales had me flailing for a while. On one hand, I did enjoy reading it, laughing out loud as every scene pushed the boundaries of believability. (Let’s just say an apocalyptic war, alligators, and the SPCA are involved in the story, okay?) It’s Darrieussecq’s more “serious” preoccupations in which I had certain reservations. Many scenes involved violence and the exploitation of women, particularly the protagonist. I felt that many of these were gratuitous, in did nothing to the story besides shock the readers and drill in the fact that man act more like pigs than the actual animals. In short, things we already know. XDDD And what’s with all these European writers and their urge to write obscene, jadedly intellectual novels anyway? Yes, Elfriede Jelinek, I’m looking at you.

Apparently, Pig Tales became an instant bestseller in France when it first came out in 1996. That says something about that country’s collective sense of humor, I guess. This book is big on satire and philosophical discourse, but I think readers will enjoy it more if they treat it as a simple bawdy tale.

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