Mammals - Pierre Merot

nothing like the french to make you laugh.

the review reads, "Mammals is a sleek, nasty, and highly intelligent creature. Pierre Merot is a funny, soulful novelist with a refreshingly jaunty take on human misery."

thus, emma's choice excerpts from chapter one.

"Every model family should have a fuck-up: a family without a fuck-up is not truly a family, because it lacks an element that challenges it, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy.

The uncle wishes his mother would pursue her obsession with disease and her tedious blather in the realm of the dead. Not that a splinter is quite so easily removed from the soul, but the physical passing of a person certainly has distinct advantages...

Aside from his social failings, the most incontrovertible proof of which has been his shameful lack of children and happiness, the uncle has also amassed a catalogue of archetypical faults: he smoked forty cigarettes a day - two and half each hour, if we assume he gets any sleep. He drinks. He is spineless. He is obsessed with sex."

i do suggest you get your hands on this book. it is wildly entertaining, albeit, black.