Antoine Volodine's 'Nos animaux préférés' Reviewed

Pascal Boulanger reviews Antoine Volodine's 'Nos animaux préférés', published by Éditions du Seuil. The book is described as a work of 'war literature' (Kleist) that resists complacent novels and conventional language. Set in a wild, rocky landscape, it features a fallen king, an elephant, malevolent sirens, birds without memory, assassins, and anonymous tortured figures. Volodine's writing confronts trauma and terror, presenting a series of brief tales that are nightmarish and grotesque. The review questions what literature carries in times of distress, concluding that it bears the intuition of a historically degenerate era where physical and psychic exhaustion follows active rumination on defeat and the past.