FOWL EULOGIES, strange, absurd, and very French

FOWL EULOGIES
LUCIE RICO (tr. Daria Chernysheva)
World Editions
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Fowl Eulogies is an absurd fairy tale for the ethical carnivore, fiction of perfect madness, of brutal and unprecedented humor. From the meadow to the supermarket, this dazzling first novel of mischief and feathers, brings to life the singular poetry of the industrial chicken.

Upon her mother's death, Paule Rojas, a vegetarian city-dweller, returns to the chicken farm where she grew up. Pressured to fulfil her mother's last request, Paule rediscovers pleasure and meaning in running the old family business. Yet, eager to bring something of herself to a family tradition, Paule embarks on increasingly intricate ways of helping the chickens to self-actualize before their deaths. She records the chickens' life stories, adding them to the labels that decorate the vacuum-packed meat sent off to market—an individual biography for every chicken.

But not all runs smooth in her childhood village; Paule finds she has few friends and many enemies. She is forced to spread her wings, relocate her livestock, and oversee the construction of an urban farm of never-before-seen practices and proportions.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A fable of modern factory farming that manages to be cautionary, amusing, and thought-provoking.

A woman whose mode of survival as a being is a rejection of her mother's means of support deals with the grief of losing a mother she...felt conflicted about, let's say...reassesses everything as she goes through the process. What I've always known about les animaux, their individualty and complexity within their scope, is apparently a revelation to Paule. That bumfuzzles me a bit, as it seems someone who has had life-long contact with them ought to have picked up on that before. After all, she did go vegetarian, yet *now* as she's learning to like killing chickens, she discovers their individuality...? Well, just go with it, I advised myself.

The pleasure of the read, to me at least, is in the fantastical element of mass public response to Paule's oddball response to being a chicken-killer for a living: Those obituaries for the bird you're roasting as dinner catching fire (!) with the bird-munching public seems wildly improbable to me. It makes me grin. It gave me a moment of wistful acknowledgment that my existence is predicated on the deaths of innumerable other living things I'll never know a thing about. In this vein of response, the story reminded me of that other very, very French novel of wildly improbable events, A Novel Bookstore.

It seems a truly French thing is to use fantastical and unlikely human responses to things in order to question those underpinnings of our world we don't spend a lot of time considering. It doesn't take Author Rico a huge page-count to get to the meat (!) of her fable. There's a sting in the tail of the tale, I suspect put there to cause discomfort. How many people can, if they really *know*, genuinely get that the food they eat is mass death? This applies equally to vegetarians, of course, but they seem not to worry overmuch about plant sentience. As forms of denial of evidence go, that one's pretty sensible since the world does not support the exitence of billions of Jains.

As a story meant to provoke thought, I'm on a different point on the curve of Author Rico's trajectory. I was far more focused, for my edification and education, on the many iterations of the vile, evil Violet Gamart of The Bookshop that populate the story. The innumerable, deeply solipsistic NIMBYs, the no-change stasis lovers, the PTB threatened in their sacred wallets by new ideas, all abound. I was varyingly infuriated, repulsed, and appalled at Paule's detractors. It was thus saddening to see Paule gradually submerge into The Capitalist System. I expected it. I was still saddened.

I suspect her evoking of my sadness is meant to remind me that collusion can be coerced from any of us; that principles are costly; that human nature is destructive always in all ways. Bleak as it is, this is a truth self-evident to any remotely honest observer of life.

As a way to "eat my spinach," this read is a properly well-made inducement. As a translation, it is smoothly made. As a narrative, your French gear needs to be engaged or its absurdity will clonk you hard. If you can shift that gear, this is a delight of a read.