A Beast in Paradise

A Beast in Paradise is Tina Kover’s translation of Cécile Coulon’s 2019 French original Une bête au paradis.

The Paradise of the title is the name of an idyllically situated farm, and the novel opens with 80 year old Blanche walking through the, now dormant, grounds:

"She passes the chicken coop, the barn, the dog—perhaps the twelfth or thirteenth one she’s known here; it has no name, they just call it “Dog,” like the others before it—and makes her way quickly to the pigpen, a circle of boards with a swinging door whose latch sticks in the winter cold. The ground is leathery here, packed hard by years of trampling and now abandoned, untouched by feet or hooves. In the pen itself, so vast for a place no longer sheltering any animals, in the pen Blanche stands straight-backed, despite the eighty years that weigh heavy on her heart, etching deep lines in her face and transforming her fingers into broken twigs."

The next chapter takes us back to her losing her virginity, aged 16, with a local boy Alexandre, while everyone else is distracted by the annual slaughter of a pig:

"Blanche and Alexandre made love for the first time while the pig was being bled in the yard. They’d closed the windows without drawing the curtains. Downstairs, the party was in full swing. The animal shrieked like a torture victim, the neighboring farmers gathered round, the blood forming large dark poppies in the beaten earth. Under the big tree in front of the door, Louis had set up tables covered with cloths embroidered with the initials of the Émard family. Forty people had come for the bloodletting, the little ones watching, wide-eyed. Émilienne, at the head, called out, “Careful now, careful! The blood, save the blood.”"

Émilienne is Blanche’s grandmother, the family matriarch:

"The repeated sorrows had given her a sort of power, a fortitude that grew ever mightier in the imaginations of those who interacted with her. Émilienne had always been an old woman. Not an elderly lady; an old woman. The kind that continue, relentlessly, to consolidate their small empires through the sheer strength of their spirits, which are so immense, so densely peopled with miracles and horrors, so monumental."

Those sorrows include the early death of her husband and the death in a car accident of her daughter Marianne, and son-in-law Étienne in a car accident, leaving Blanche and her younger brother, then aged 5 and 3, orphaned.

Émilienne takes over their upbringing as well as her laborious work on the farm, taking in, to help her, Louis, around 10 years older than the children, who had been repeatedly beaten by his father.

"She stood up on legs made thin and wiry by hard work, by comings and goings, by the bearing of children and of coffins, and let herself be swallowed up by the house, leaving the tree to weep in her stead, turning her attention to the living sleep of Blanche and Louis. That sleep, in this house, here, deep in Paradise—Émilienne was proud of it. Prouder of it than she was of the place itself, because she had raised these young ones up out of the grief and misery in which they’d been mired; Louis, crushed by his father’s fists, and Blanche and Gabriel, crushed by their parents’ deaths."

The novel then proceeds to tell the chronological story of the family farm, and Blanche and Alexandre's relationship, with brief episodic chapters with titles such as HURTING, PROTECTING, BUILDING, OVERCOMING, GROWING UP, KILLING, COMING INTO EXISTENCE, WATCHING, RISKING, and RUNNING AWAY.

While Blanche is bound to her native soil, Alexandre is more restless, leaving in his late teens to seek his fortune elsewhere, including on the opposite side of the world. But when he returns, after a 12 year absence, hidden passions erupt violently.

In part the novel reminded me of Animalia, with porcine-centric lush prose in Tina Kover's vivid translation, although A Beast in Paradise celebrates farming more albeit with a realistic not bucolic view, and the rural setting is ultimately a landscape, a context for the story itself, which is more concerned with affairs of the heart.

The novel at times has the epic feeling of an epic 19th century one, and I can see it may be a little overwrought for some, but I found myself caught up in the characters and the setting. Indeed Coulon has said that she regards her competition as Netflix and her aim to grab a reader's attention, with writing that is still demanding - and in that regard, she follows in the tradition of Ferrante, another author brought to us in English by Europa Editions.

"As soon as she could straighten up without pain, Blanche plucked the spider nearest to her mouth and repeated her act of twelve years earlier, swallowing it without chewing, sensing nothing on her tongue but a faint tang. Her movement had caused a second spider to fall. It lay near her ankle. Very quickly she seized it and sent it, whole, down her throat. Shivers ran through Blanche’s body, greedy, avid, like a bird beating its wings between her breasts and her sex, demanding to be fed, famished, imploring, and Blanche , aroused by the taste of blood and chitin, scrutinized every centimeter of the wall in search of another living being to devour."