Overview

Pig Tales is a brilliant satirical novel about a stunning young woman working in a beauty 'massage' parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses - into a pig. Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and forage for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything (pizza is a particular favourite; she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy) until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes . Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel. Pig Tales is a metamorphosis for the present day, a dark fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul.

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9780571193721

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Reviews

A major critical and popular success in France ( currently selling over 3,000 copies a day ), this thin Kafkaesque parable describes the gradual transformation of a young woman who works in a beauty parlor into a pig who sagely comments on her country's bland drift toward conservatism. The concept has keen satiric possibilities, and the details of the narrator's increasing gluttony and sexual rapacity are wittily imagined and presented. But there's not much novel here beyond the intriguing premise: It's a one-joke book. (Kirkus Reviews)

The narrator of this bizarre tale is ample, porcine, rosy and curvy. She enjoys extraordinary success in bringing home the bacon as a masseur in a 'beauty parlour'. Until, that is, she metamorphoses into a pig. Rejected, foraging in sewers, her only option is to take up with a depraved werewolf with insatiable appetites (when they share pizza, she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy). For those that dare, Darrieusseq offers an intense satire on a society which condemns anyone gifted with less-than-perfect looks. Not subtle, but it is memorable. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in Bayonne, France. She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Her debut novel, Pig Tales (1996), was published in 34 countries and became the most popular first novel in France since the 1950s. Her second novel,My Phantom Husband (1998), became an immediate bestseller. Her third novel, Breathing Underwater, prompted Francis Gilbert in The Times to declare that 'there are very few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them'. Her most recent novel, White, was published in 2005.

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