Noëlle Revaz

Vulva. This is what Paul, the illiterate farmer-narrator of Revaz's With the Animals calls his wife. Lest you think it's a form of tenderness when he calls her "my Vulva," rest assured, "it's not often I call her 'my,' and more often it's 'that big lump,' or 'that floozy,' or 'that sow,' except when the opportunity comes up when you need to show your ownership, that you've a stake in the matter and you're master over her." Paul is unsure of the names and number of their offspring, but each of his animals has a name and a history.

Such is Paul's relationship to his metonym of a wife. His physically and sexually abusive relationship to her is complicated by two potentially life-altering situations. The first, the arrival of the summer's farmhand (or intern), Jorge--immediately renamed "Georges" by Paul--and second, the discovery that Vulva has cancer. Georges is a former medical student who fancies himself an expert of female nature. He undertakes to soften Paul, to humanize "Vulvia" (Georges' accent). When Vulva leaves the farm for the hospital to receive radiation treatment, Georges finds himself alone with Paul, in other words, alone with the animals.

SPOILER (or at least this reader's speculation):
It seems to me this would make an incredibly disturbing horror film in the vein of "students get more than they bargain for when they study abroad." Vulva is essentially kidnapped, raped and impregnated against her will (over and over). Her physical and social isolation prolong the abuse. When Jorge arrives, he seems to understand her situation and endeavors to rescue her. This attempt is successful so long as Vulva remains in hospital, but alas, Georges' tenure at the farm comes up in September, and Vulva once again finds herself vulnerable and unprotected. She's survived only to endure further abuse. But does she? Curious whether other readers speculated that Vulva was responsible for the outbreak of illness that decimates the farm? Was Paul's mother responsible for the illness that nearly destroyed it years before Vulva's arrival? What to make of this: "That time on the farm, long before Georges ever set foot on it, after the fridge broke down, after that meat gave us the big stomach upset, Vulva never felt a thing in her bacon and ate by herself alone at the table that night with a smile on her mug just like we was all there"?… (meer)

Efina tells of the relationship between an actor, T, and Efina over the course of time. They write each other sometimes unsent letters avowing love, spewing disgust, letters that taunt, letters born of boredom. The two encounter each other, often by contrived chance, they refuse to acknowledge each other's presence, they repair to a hotel room. For a time they live together; for long periods they are out of touch with each other. Along the way, both have children, spouses, other affairs.

There's a story in that, but Revaz doesn't spell out each word of it.. Someone asked me recently why I'm keener on fiction from the Continent than from English speakers; dunno, said I, and fumbled about with words like 'fresher', 'less constrained', 'more detached', 'far more subtle'. Reading this reminded me of that. An Anglo writer would I suspect most likely have begun with the first encounter between the two, followed the timeline to an end of it, packed the book with descriptions of the relationships with wives, husbands, lovers, children and inserted a good deal of her/himself however indirectly.

A book like that would tell the usual story in the usual way and be a bore, probably a banal one.. What Revaz does is more interesting and more effective. She begins the novel at some indeterminate moment after the affair has begun and, after showing some of the letters the two exchanged and telling us whether they were saved, trashed, forgotten, she shows various moments ('episodes' would imply a sense of drama or significance) in T's life and in Efina's, some shared and others apart, over an indeterminate number of years. This to me makes the novel far more true to life than a conventional, fleshed-out story would have been: When I look back over the years, or even today, it's not a boundless and placid sea that I look at but skerries rising out of the sea. We don't live each moment equally and we don't recall times past as a continuous & retrievable expanse; memory has us leaping from one skerry to another. And so, without our knowing how old the lovers are nor how long their relationship lasts, Revaz gives a far more realistic sense of time--and hence of what takes place in the novel's time-span-- than an ordinary writer would.

And as for engaging the reader's emotions, Revaz doesn't try to, never mind trying to engage his sympathies. Her tone is detached, her style flat and rather conversational, and neither of the main characters is except superficially attractive. In fact we learn very little indeed about Efina, and that only obliquely. (As well, it's so bloody refreshing to read a novel whose author doesn't buy into that Mars/Venus nonsense: Efina devotes as little thought to the child she lost/handed over as T does to his children. Efina moves as blithely from one bed, one affair, to another as T. Not a chance here of one whinging about inability to bear children or the other about being unable to live up to his father's ideal of masculinity, etc. etc.)

I've linked on main page to a review making some interesting points about Revaz's style; unfortunately I found it only after reading the book, so I don't know how well the translation reflects the original. I do know that Efina left so strong an impression that it will be lurking at the back of my mind for some time to come.… (meer)