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Endangered species. Mammals is less a novel, more an agglomeration of pensées, aperçus, bons mots and numerous other things for which there aren’t any wieldy English translations. A self-exploration of “uncle”, a 40-year-old alcoholic, sexual misadventurer and misanthrope, Mérot’s novel can be trying, but for the most part it makes the virulent negativity of its worldview palatable by being very, very funny.Uncle occasionally longs for a normal life, a house in the suburbs, a dog and “some low-key cancer”, but for the most part he trawls Parisian bars picking up girls he is invariably too inebriated to couple with. The tragedy of uncle’s life (wisely discussed in the implicatory second-person) is that, for all his cynicism, he’s a romantic. Whether that makes him less or more monstrous depends, I suppose, on how much of a drink-sozzled, rebarbative cad the individual reader might be. The chapter in which he travels by train to Poland to meet his first wife’s family is a compressed masterpiece, and is alone quite enough to justify investing in this invigorating, nauseating novel. Mammals by Pierre Mérot, out now published by Canongate.
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