ANIMAL STORIES

Cages of the imagination.

What makes us human? Should we look inside ourselves, study social groups, and meditate on the past? Zambreno has a different answer. In this eloquent collection of essays, the novelist and essayist argues that we find ourselves in the mirror of animals. Stories about visiting zoos intertwine with reflections on primatology and photographs of creatures. A Victorian snapshot of children riding an elephant prompts this rumination: “Perhaps [it situates] the Eurocen­tric nineteenth-century zoo attitude, a narrative of colonialism and alienation from labor (absent while present), a story of tragedy and absurdity, the only possible tonal registers for the history of capitalism.” Zambreno offers up what they call a bestiary—evoking those older medieval collections of moral tales of animal behavior. Each essay becomes a kind of social allegory. In a section on the work of Franz Kafka, the author sees his famous Metamorphosis as a story of humanity lost in the face of modern, bureaucratic life. Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. That moment is the lens through which we are invited to see Kafka in the large—a man living always with the animal inside him. A photograph of Kafka and a girlfriend and a dog becomes an emblem of a search for contact, for companionship that humans cannot offer the creative writer. Zambreno writes in the wake of W.G. Sebald, whose autofictions about photographs and found things live in the penumbra of postmodern alienation, and of Hugh Raffles, whose Book of Unconformities gives us an encyclopedia of uncanny objects. Zambreno’s is less a book about animals or other humans than it is a tour of the zoo cages of the writer’s own mind, opened for all of us to gaze on and gasp.

Lyrical meditations on the creative imagination and the animal in all of us.