Le zoo des absents by Baqué, Joël

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le zoo des absents by Baqué, Joël Warren Motte Baqué, Joël. Le zoo des absents. P.O.L, 2022. ISBN 978-2-8180-5429-1. Pp. 192. René Cormet, an accountant who has recently retired from the “Salaisons Occitanes” in Béziers, finds himself at loose ends. He is a very ordinary man, except insofar as his diet is concerned, for he eats neither meat nor fish. Not out of conviction, but simply because he cannot digest the former and he is allergic to the latter. By virtue of what he habitually buys in the supermarket (or rather, what he does not buy), and through an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, René stumbles into the world of animal rights. He is initiated therein by a young woman named Stella, a resolute antispecist who feels that the conception of animals as inferior to humans and thus exploitable for human benefit must be countered, and ultimately overthrown. Hoping that Stella will not discover that he spent his entire career working for an industrial charcutier, René makes his way into this new milieu with interest and considerable bemusement. The fauna that he encounters therein is diverse indeed: vegetarians and vegans, moral philosophers and ethicists, committed militants from groups like “L214 Éthique & animaux,” “RWAS (Reducing Wild Animal Suffering)”, and “268 Libération animale.” The ideals and action program of those people are likewise various, and the organizations they represent are often in situations of mutual (and internal) conflict. René contemplates that dynamic from a position on the margin, consoling himself by reading La Fontaine, and by cultivating the only garden he possesses, a bonsai pine tree which provides him with “présence discrète non dépourvue de personnalité” (10). Taking things as they come, and remaining open to new practices and possibilities, René follows a roundabout path of experience that takes him well beyond what he might have imagined. He moves to Switzerland in order to serve the newly established Fondation Ménalon, whose opulence is assured by the generosity of a Californian tech giant. In the verdant, bucolic Valais, René is introduced to NextMind, “une société qui travaillait sur un ordinateur neuromorphique et s’apprêtait à réaliser un processeur entièrement biologique” (167). In his new incarnation as “René Cormet.6,” the first human quadragram, he will lead tours through the “Zoo des Absents,” peopled with quadragrams of predator species rendered extinct by virtue of their own predatory nature. The events of René’s new life are fickle enough to beggar the imagination of anyone, let alone an individual who had previously lived as uneventfully as he did. One wonders on occasion if Joël Baqué is not equally surprised at the way things unfold in his novel. It is hard to discern a narrative teleology here, apart from the fact that things progress, haltingly, toward a state of dystopia. Purporting to deal with ideas in one of its aspects at least, Le zoo des absents cannot be called a novel of ideas. Yet if one is willing, like René, to be swept along in a current of improbability, this book will provide pleasures of a different order. [End Page 203] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French