Pig Tales

I’d beed interested in reading Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq (translated as Pig Tales by Linda Coverdale) since it appeared on that Guardian 1000 novels list last year. Unfortunately it is out of print in this country but popping into my local second-hand bookshop on the way back from the dentist earlier in the week I was amazed to see they had not one but two copies. Here is the brief description from the Guardian:

It wasn’t a problem at first: to be more voluptuous, to have a firmer, more rounded bottom and breasts, to be pinker and more healthy-looking is far from a disadvantage to a girl working in a massage parlour in a sex-crazed dystopian society. But the changes don’t stop there: her hunger dominates (her preferred foods are now flowers and raw potatoes), her pleasant plumpness becomes rolls of fat, her glow turns ruddy. A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off. Darrieussecq’s modern philosophical tale is witty, telling and hearteningly feminist.

At under 150 pages of large print, it is clearly a novella rather than a novel and understandably several of the reviews reference The Metamorphosis but it is more Voltaire than Kafka, a gloriously deadpan farce in the tradition of Candide.