Bestial novels

Among the novels starring animals , George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) undoubtedly stands out, linking with the tradition of classic fables to reflect human nature. More daring, half a century later, was the French-Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad's novel Anima (2012), where we learn everything through the eyewitness accounts of a group of animals (including insects) identified by the author by their scientific names. A dazzling technique that offers multiple perspectives on the events.

Now that Mikhail Bulgakov has arrived at the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc, with the version of El Mestre i Margarita directed by Àlex Rigola, it is worth remembering that in 1925 Bulgakov published Heart of a Dog (translated into Catalan by Josep Maria de Sagarra i Àngel, grandson of the poet of the same name), a satire on Soviet society starring a stray dog, Sharik, who tells us about his life until a scientist transforms him into a man.

There have been many narrating dogs. Who doesn't remember the musings of Mr. Bones in Paul Auster's Timbuktu (1999)? It's harder to find narrators of other animal species. Tom Sharpe confessed to having been won over to the reading movement by Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), in which he makes a crow talk. And in a hilarious parody by François Caradec entitled The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí Told by Himself (1973), Raymond Roussel's biographer allows himself to include passages narrated by a fly.

The latest novel by Joan-Lluís Lluís, 'Una cançó de pluja', is a deformed mirror

Joan-Lluís Lluís, who in El dia de l'ós (2004) had already incorporated a Pyrenean plantigrade into his literary recreation of the Vallespir bear festival, goes further in Una cançó de pluja (A Pluja Song) (Club Editor, 2025). Here he adjusts the narrative to the perspective of an orangutan named Ella-Calla, who escapes from a ship carrying a group of hunted primates.

It is a verse novel organized into short chapters, which immerses us in the personal experience of the fugitive orangutan as she returns to the Borneo jungle, a journey initially inspired by the Homeric journey of Ulysses. The word orangutan comes from the Malay: orang (man) and hûtan (jungle). We soon find ourselves immersed in an eccentric mythology invented for this species of hominid primate, which resonates like an echo of humanity's ancestral times.

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Until human truths burst in, shaving (from "rapar" and "to rape" ) the female to prostitute her in a rustic brothel—and again, everything reaches us through Ella-Calla. The shaved creature, subjected to the attacks of drunks and tied up as in a zoophilic masochistic fantasy, acts as a distorted mirror that reflects the most execrable side of human nature.