Living up to its reputation, this putrid book was not the breeziest read. Relentless misery hedged by long descriptive passages of piggy sex, shitting and slaughter. The prose is a waking nightmare that blurs ruined faces together, flattens time, and only becomes lucid in the abattoir.

The result is ambitious & engaging, but the brutality doesn't lead to much beyond a self-contained pessimism. Pasolini without a sense of humor. I suppose that puts Del Amo in a very french lineage of Flaubert, de Maupassant and Zola; great misanthropes whose excellent stories become tediously predictable.

Here's a nice passage about kitten slaughter that I got a kick out of:

One of his first memories of Henri is seeing him hurl kittens against the wall of the pig shed and watching the shattered, broken remains fall at his feet on the bare concrete, seeing the halos left on the brickwork, veering from red to brown to black as the days pass. Dogs and cats are the animals they are most reluctant to kill, but in the world of the farm, females give birth until they are worn out, and it is for the men to decide which of their offspring should survive. Serge tears puppies from their mothers’ teats, rips them from kennels, grips their furry bodies in his left hand and, with his right, twists their heads until he hears the soft vertebrae crack and sometimes a brief whimper, then he tosses the remains in the soot-blackened steel barrel in a corner of the farmyard, which sometimes burns and smoulders for days, belching oily smoke, reeking of glowing scrap iron, melted plastic, burnt garbage.