DThe instructions for his novel “Nur die Tiere” are provided by Colin Niel, the first few sentences. People always want a beginning, it says, they “imagine if a story starts somewhere, it must have an end.” What happened nowhere in the center of the French plot has become a kind of gossip among residents, including silent post effects. You rotate something, smooth the edge here, and polish a detail there. “I will do that,” said one character. “At least you have something to say, everyone wants to say something, otherwise you don’t exist.” This means: don’t believe everything you read.
This will defeat the thriller and support the legend of the human soul. Yes, this book is about a missing woman. No, the step-by-step solution to the case is not the only driving force of the plot. Neal, born in Kramat in 1976, prefers to think about the connection between narrative instinct and the human condition. If we really only exist when communicating, then its protagonist does not have to worry about their existence. Five people report their relationship with the missing person one by one, and will be allowed to reveal the murdered Évelyne Ducat. Everyone has his own sociology. Each has a different narrative strategy. Everyone pretends to be a narrative theorist.
The nonconformist among the Whodunit experts
Anyone who succumbs to such a procedure to a novel must be careful not to get drowned in the myth of creating civilization and meaningful creative behavior (it was the word in the beginning!). Because crime stories and pseudo-academic lectures are usually close together-fans of this type know the problem. That’s not the case with Neil. He weaves a tear-proof plot, because starting from his staff, he occasionally sprinkled reflections, which can claim to be universally effective, but forbid himself to transform the characters into a container of cultural and historical significance.
For this unconventional person among the Whodunit experts, the psychologically neglected characters and the plot structure free from any pattern are more important than self-praise. This also persuaded Dominic Moore, who showed the film version of the material at the Venice International Film Festival in 2019.
In the quagmire of interpersonal relationships
Incidents are often triggered by coincidence, without a trace of hope. Alice, a social worker who cares about local farmers, pointed out: “What we see is the breakdown of the family and the relationship, because the wife wants a child and the husband wants a new stable; a man who falls into depression under the pure burden of work. “The communication with her husband, Michel, who is also a farmer, has degenerated into a trickle. His equally taciturn colleague Joseph said: “Well, I only know how to talk to sheep.” Alice fell in love with him and deceived her husband, wondering if she should be ashamed or happy about it.
Once she said: “We looked at each other for a few seconds, and I looked for an explanation in his eyes, which is more determined than ever.” She is not alone, because “only animals” is about double search: for about Évelyne Ducat and the truth about the nature of others. Since there is no final answer, readers will follow how the characters procrastinate, explore and explain in the quagmire of interpersonal relationships, trying in vain to grasp the reality of their partner and the sleeping person. But what appeared there, “between fiction and exaggeration, is a depiction of the missing, perhaps not far from reality.” So literature tells us that in the end everything can be literature.
Neal’s great art unfolded in economic dialogue, and it imploded before it could even speed up. However, as far as the border line of Maribe is concerned, this is an explosive dialogue. Like her colleagues, she is also seeking closeness and hopes to be embraced like a cocoon with the right words at the right time. At the same time, she destroys these needs by establishing contact with the married Évelyne Ducat, thereby changing from subject to object: one decides the date of the date, the other accepts self-destructive dependence and accepts “a few grains of love and fleeting Happy, she gave me food rations like an abandoned animal.”
The characters perform a series of “anger, sadness, hatred and love, incomprehension and guilt”. In the penultimate chapter-the background is Ivory Coast-the author reduced the psychological modification to clarify the background of the event. Therefore, this book is not messed up, but human dynamics, too human behavior, which is conducive to a fairly flat chain of causality in narrative economics. Does a story that starts somewhere must have an ending? Of course, the story of Évelyne Ducat reappears in the last few pages and develops in a new direction. Open end.
Colinnier: “Only animals”. Fiction. Translated from French by Anne Thomas. Lenos Verlag, Basel 2021. 286 pages, Br., 22, -€.
