Palafox

by Éric Chevillard

Eric Chevillard's visionary play of word and thought has been compared to the work of Beckett, Michaux, and Pinget, yet the universe he spins is utterly his own. Palafox (Editions de Minuit, 1990), Chevillard's third novel of eleven, explores the ecosystem of an unclassifiable yet enchanting protean creature, Palafox. A team of experts armed with degrees of higher learning is determined to label, train, baptize, and realize the elusive creature, while Palafox effortlessly and wordlessly defies them all.

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, 20th Century, Humor

192 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Éric Chevillard is a French novelist. He has won awards for several novels including La nébuleuse du crabe in 1993, which won the Fénéon Prize for Literature.

His work often plays with the codes of narration sometimes to the degree that it is even difficult to understand which story is related in his books, and has consequently been classified as postmodern literature. He has been noted for his associations with Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing-house largely associated with the leading experimental writers composing in French today.

Reviews

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Palafox isn't a parakeet or a fox. He's not really a crocodile or a puma or a jellyfish. He's mostly a badly behaved critter who refuses to be any one animal and so becomes the All-Animal. A portrait of Palafox is impossible; instead, Palafox is a portrait of us. Humans, I mean. And all the narratives humans have about animals stick to Palafox, from the poor lost house cat to the man-eating tiger. But while he's the beast, it's us who are proven beastly. This book, through Palafox, piles up all the fur and meat and antlers into a great exposition of our vanity, voracity, folly. But this book is mostly a bunch of madcap fun, too, so don't forget that either.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

All our relationships to our siblings of the animal kingdom: to hunt, to capture, to study, to fear and to admire, to compete, to domesticate, to train, to constrain, and finally, in the inevitable outcome of capitalist society, to consume in a million parallel ways. There's satiric sparkle here, often submerged under a purely linguistic play and generation. This should richen the experience, and sometimes it does, but it also sometimes feels like we're either in pure commentary or pure sentence construction, with the essential threads of story lost somewhere between the poles. Still, enjoyable.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, picture a nonspecific animal that is part insect, part bird, part lizard, part pachydern, and you have the Palafox. The book by Eric Chevillard is something of a bagatelle, and probably not for animal lovers. The first half of Palafox is mostly taken up by a chase when the beast gets loose. In the second half, the creature's human caregivers try to figure out what to do with it: put it in the circus, cook it, kill it ... whatever. It's rather difficult to sympathize with the Palafox, because we have such a difficult time imagining what it looks like:

We approach, he recoils, frightening, he beats his chest with his enormous fists, as if he were trying to hammer out armor in a hurry. We draw back. Palafox takes advantage of our hesitation, and wriggling around he attempts to slip through the netting -- he has already managed to get his head and one of his paws through, three, seven, then twelve of his paws, but already we are on him. Franc-Nohain winds rope around his ankles. Swanscombe muzzles him and Algernon, Algernon chloroforms him. Two fat balls of cork borrowed from Sadarnac take the treachery out of those horns. Let us be sure we make him exhaust his venom: be careful not to make him spit his poison. Then Algernon slips him gingerly into a crystal-clear paper pouch and gives free reign [rein?] to his joy.

Thus, the shaggy Palafox story. In the end, the Palafox is innocent, but we humans look awfully cold-hearted.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

c.f. Pinget's Graal flibuste, Evens' Panter

And then it is time to gather Palafox into his cage. The ornithologist grabs him by one paw, the other claw crushes his hand. He lets go. Free, Palafox hops into the gutter. In the water, he gets his sea legs immediately — helped along by the current, he soon reaches a manhole, he lets himself be sucked down, head first, at the risk of blemishing his magisterial antlers. [39]

Nothing frightens him, neither the scarecrows in the fields, nor the aluminum ribbons in the apricot trees, not the little owls crucified to the fences, not the cries of buzzards or kites broadcast uninterrupted over loudspeakers — to complete the illusion the cries seem to come from the pumpkins themselves. Palafox remains elusive. A few dogs from the farms dispatched to pursue his scent return rabid and have to be destroyed. Now we barely get a glimpse of him if that, sometimes a red shadow, a silver shimmer, a brown shape which leaps from the ground, shaking his little pink hands like an impudent marionette, or a green tail which slides silently between stones. We immediately grab a stick, you name it, a sachet, a scythe, we rush, but are too late, again too late, the black dot on the horizon, the white dot at the zenith, Palafox remains out of reach. [46]

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit. This book is brilliant, bizarre, sublime, and surreal - in the best ways possible. Imagine an avant-garde concept album by Deerhoof, Danielson, or Captain Beefheart, and then mix in Calvino's mysticism, Pratchett's whimsy, and Welcome to Night Vale's humor. Simply glorious.

[Horvallis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amusant au début, mais ennuyeux après cinquante pages car le procédé qui consiste à prendre les expressions au pied de la lettre, même s'il produit souvent du comique, s'use très vite...
J'ai abandonné la lecture.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absurdist, philosophical, fabulist.

The Palafox is a creature who defies classification and makes a mockery of scientists’ quest for knowledge. From the Palafox’s first appearance, man wants to capture it, to enclose it, encase it, train it, splash it with sulphuric acid, study it, categorise it, claim its discovery as their own, and dissect it.

House him, but in what? A matchbox with 10, no 15, holes bored in its cover, or a pen, a fishtank.

Palafox is absent of plot, and thematically heavy-handed, yet its prose is playful and poetic. Chevillard's sentences are extended, convoluted, self-correcting and circle back on themselves.

One morning at dawn, he made his cry heard, which is to say, a sort of chirping, or more of a meowing, or more of a barking, or more of a lowing, well that's almost it, a roar, or more exactly a trumpeting, yes, that's the word, a sort of chirping.

While slight, this wonderful curiosity is best savoured at length, rather than read in one sitting.

Spectacular translation by Wyatt Alexander Mason.

Well done publisher, Archipelago, for selecting the cover in crepuscular blue; the taller, slimmer shape than standard; French flaps and gorgeous laid paper. All of which denote this as a work of distinction.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

This one took me a while. At its best, it's a wonderfully lyrical torrent of specialized words which flow, mesmerize, and intrigue. At its worst, it's just lists which never seem to end. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the life & death of the titular animal, a protean beast which can assume any attributes the surreal logic of the moment require, during Palafox's time with the Buffoon family.

Props to the translator, Wyatt Mason, who did an excellent job conveying this fantastical French prose into English. I also hugely enjoyed the narrow form factor, the luxuriously creamy paper, and the typesetting from Archipelago Press.

[Cariann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up at random in a bookstore years ago. I respect the very interesting writing style, but it wasn’t for me.

[P. Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe the translation was weird (didn’t even know it was French till yesterday) but was so confused for most of this which felt intentional. Palafox is awesome though.

[Sophie]

it did not feel important to finish

[Viola]

[Read in Italian]

[Julie.Mls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tout est déroutant dans ce livre qui cherche à questionner les habitudes du lecteur, ses certitudes et sa compréhension de l’intrigue et de ses personnages au fur et à mesure que sa lecture avance. Je ne sais pas si cet auteur est affilié au Nouveau Roman mais tout dans cette écriture très technique et déstabilisante me fait penser à mes expériences de lectrice de Butor ou de Robbe-Grillet.
Bien que j’admire la critique sociale, le cynisme, le style et la recherche sur la langue, on sent le goût de l’auteur pour des mots rares ou vieillis, les listes, des phrases à la fois heurtées ou qui s’étirent avec un esprit d’escalier parfois jouissif, je reste très hermétique à cette lecture. Je fais exprès d’écrire cette critique alors que ma lecture est loin d’être finie car je patine et je veux me souvenir de ma difficulté à entrer dans ce livre. L’aspect mouvant des personnages, à l’image de cette bestiole qui ne se laisse jamais vraiment saisir et l’intrigue morcelée du texte me laissent pour l’instant à l’extérieur de Palafox, peut être suis-je déstabilisée comme Éric Chevillard veut que je le sois ?

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chevillard makes the impossible happen every second sentence. With dazzling wit and a staggering sense of the grotesque Palafox narrates, belabours, teases, and tricks along the story of a protean creature and the family who attempts to find, take care of, profit from, and finally kill, it. Its name is Palafox, but that seems the only sure thing about it. Perhaps most strikingly, however, is the sense that none of what goes on is in the least way surreal, banal, or dreamlike: everything is presented with the same levelled tone (which could never, however, be mistaken for the voice of some tepid realist prose fiction, however). It's been a while since I read a book with such a strongly intertwined sense of the dark and the delightful. Oh, and Archipelago Books have made this a beauty of a book, which is a nice touch on their part. Fine paper, dry, matte covers, a restrained colour scheme. It gives a sombre touch to the book that compliments, I feel, the written voice.

Perhaps this could stand as a new, unprepossesing, writers' manifesto:

you will forgive us the tangents that punctuate this story, or make it unravel, since we always manage to make our way back to the point.

Parenthetically: Goodreads, you've got a crazy way of complimenting people:

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's exceptionally hard to describe Palafox in any way that does justice to the book, or gives a true sense of the experience reading it. In a nutshell—better, in this case: in an eggshell—it's about a strange creature appearing on a family's breakfast table and taking over their lives and their story. But the plot's not the point here. The animal, Palafox, sometimes seems like a bird and at others a jellyfish and still others a dragon or dog. Sometimes he's huge and sometimes he's tiny, growing and shrinking even in the course a single paragraph or page. Everything else in the story is equally slippery: it's a romance, a hunting story, a war story, a family drama, etc., and the way Chevillard's language (via Wyatt Mason's translation) circles back on and rewrites itself constantly. It's the pleasure of all that, just the sheer joy of reading this book, that's hard to describe, because while there are any number of novels about strange creatures, monsters, and the like (a favorite subject of mine), there are a few if any others in which the playfulness of subject and style come together so smoothly as they do here.

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unlikely and almost simple farce, breathless, overfed on indulgences, and spun out of thin air. Written so tight that it can barely be read more than a paragraph at a time.

... And the typesetting, paper stock, and overall design? Quiet, quiet, quiet, and proper. A cool blue wrapper shoring up a gooey rainbow of clashing ideas.

[Sean Masterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am currently unable to say much about this book. Few texts succeed in really transporting you to another dimension (?)/ plane (?)/ place (?). Until I can better reconcile the dimension / plane / place of this novel with the one I inhabit I will say no more. Except to say that if you like Kafka, Borges and Cortazar, you'll probably dig this novel (?). I am digging it.

[Dyani · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is perhaps my favorite book. it reads like the best kind of fever dream. while i read it i was eating wasabi peas and pet-sitting in this weird, damp house that was mostly packed up into boxes.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somersaults of language in the cosmos of palafox- a furry enigmatic animal.

[Paul Kerschen]

It's a romp, and the mutable animal is one of those great unstageable Gogolian conceits... but it's all tilting against some version of realism that may not even exist any more, and wouldn't notice us if it did.