A BEAST IN PARADISE

A farm engulfs the lives of two women.

When their parents are killed in a car accident, 5-year-old Blanche and her 3-year-old brother, Gabriel, are taken in by their grandmother Émilienne and grow up on her farm, Paradise, in northern France. In a spare, somber family saga, award-winning poet and fiction writer Coulon traces the fortunes of the taciturn Émilienne, devoted to the land, and Blanche, “a warrior at five years old,” whose love of Paradise impels her to become “her grandmother’s shadow, casting aside her grief in favor of Émilienne’s robust self-discipline.” Walking before she could talk, the young Blanche seemed always “overflowing with movement, as if an older child were hidden inside her, waiting for the right moment to blossom.” That moment comes when she accedes to the attentions of her charming classmate Alexandre. Coulon’s poetic cadence and lyrical prose, ably served by translator Kover, give the tale the quality of a fable in which uncontrollable desires, nature’s capricious power, and violent anger and deceit erupt into a pitiless landscape. Coulon captures the visceral cruelty of farm life, where the stench of pigs’ blood lingers for days after the animals are slaughtered and entrails litter the soil. Everyone reveals an essential bestiality: Even Gabriel, a quiet, dreamy boy, grows into a man with “something of the animal about him, an animal sick with sadness and timidity.” Humans, like beasts, labor endlessly, “the industrious angels of this Paradise of mud and beaks and manure.” For the arduous challenges of farm work, brute strength is not “an option but a necessity.” Alexandre, though, determined to escape the harsh demands of the land and the claustrophobia of rural life, chooses to seek his fortune in the city—a decision that comes to ravage the lives of everyone in Paradise.

A quiet tale of love and vengeance.