A Beast in Paradise

December 21, 2020
Coulon’s excellent English-language debut, winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, is an engrossing domestic drama centering on the love affair between ambitious Alexandre and passionate Blanche. After Blanche’s parents die in a car crash when she’s five, she and her brother are raised by Emilienne, their formidable maternal grandmother, whose devotion to her grandchildren is matched only by her dedication to her ancestral farm: Paradise. Blanche excels at school and develops a similarly unyielding commitment to Paradise as she cares for the livestock and sells eggs at the local market. At 17, Blanche falls in love with Alexandre, who is determined to leave behind their sleepy small town, and her heart is broken when he moves away after high school. When Alexandre returns 12 years later with plans to court Blanche and convince her grandmother to sell parts of Paradise, Blanche willfully ignores subtle signs of his true intentions—to scam her grandmother—and heedlessly pursues him. Coulon’s luscious descriptions of Blanche’s consuming love for both Alexandre and Paradise allows for a powerful, riveting exploration of obsession and encroaching modernity. This sensual, bold novel will surprise and delight.

January 1, 2021
Blanche and Gabriel are young when a horrific accident leaves them orphaned and in the care of their grandmother, �milienne. Needing more help on the family farm, Paradise, �milienne hires young villager Louis, to live on the property and assist with manual labor. Louis is not significantly older than the children, and when Blanche comes of age, his blossoming love is no surprise. He is thwarted, however, by Alexandre, Blanche's adolescent boyfriend, who has more confidence and potential than Louis ever will. As confident teenage boys are wont to do, though, Alexandre leaves the village behind for life in the city, obliterating Blanche's already broken heart. When he returns 12 years later, the weary family is overjoyed to see the light back in Blanche's eyes. But Alexandre's intentions are murky, and Blanche is too delicate for his tomfoolery. Blanche's sanity comes loose and Alexandre must face the tragic consequences. Kover's translation of French author Coulon's best-selling and prize-winning novel is sharp and engaging. Readers will furiously turn pages to uncover the fate of the cursed Paradise farm.

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December 1, 2020
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 �milienne 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 �milienne, 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 �milienne'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.

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