Only the Animals: Stories, by Ceridwen Dovey
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Only the Animals: Stories, by Ceridwen Dovey
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Perhaps only the animals can tell us what it is to be humanThe souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century and connected to both famous and little-known writers in surprising ways tell their astonishing stories of life and death. In a trench on the Western Front, a cat recalls her owner Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. In Nazi Germany, a dog seeks enlightenment. A Russian tortoise once owned by the Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold War. During the Siege of Sarajevo, a starving bear tells a fairy tale. And a dolphin sent to Iraq by the U.S. Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath. Exquisitely written, playful, and poignant, Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals is a remarkable literary achievement by one of our brightest young writers. An animal's-eye-view of humans at our brutal, violent worst and our creative, imaginative best, it asks us to find our way back to empathy not only for animals but for other people, and to believe again in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.
Only the Animals: Stories, by Ceridwen Dovey- Amazon Sales Rank: #331009 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Released on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.22" h x .92" w x 6.26" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Review
“These stories are strange and richly imagined, well researched and at times haunting and atmospheric . . . Dovey is a gifted prose stylist . . . This collection unflinchingly illuminates human nature, and makes clear that the rest of the natural world can only bear witness.” ―Megan Mayhew Bergman, The New York Times Book Review
“Inventive . . . Dovey has daringly shrugged off the constraints of conventional fiction. These stories are alternately funny and distressing . . . In Only the Animals, Dovey has tried something audacious. Aiming to see the world anew, she’s crafted an unusual and beguiling ode to the feathered, the four-legged, and the fearless creatures of the sea.” ―Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Dazzling.” ―Stephanie Cross, The Guardian
“The book doesn’t come across as contrived, in part because Dovey’s prose is so sharp and unsentimental, in part because she is able to use the same premise to such different effects . . , Only the Animals’ doesn’t simplify or sentimentalize, but it does suggest that there is something irreducibly powerful about our imaginative bonds with animals. As long as there are humans, there will be animals, and as long as there are animals, we will think and write and dream about them.” ―Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe
“Wonderfully weird and profoundly witty . . . Dovey's stories, at once charming and haunting, are something else altogether. "Absorbing" is not quite the right word for them--their poetic oddness keep them at arm's length--but they are intoxicating nonetheless. As unsettling as they are beautiful, these quietly wise stories wedge themselves into your mind--and stay there.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Dovey succeeds in providing original bittersweet tales with the hard-edged truths of history. An essential collection, enthusiastically recommended.” ―Donna Bettencourt, Library Journal (starred review)
“By appropriating history, mythology, folklore, and even astrology, Dovey finds impressive depth and complexity in the souls of an array of animals . . . Dovey finds humanity in her diverse protagonists, and the stories are full of surprises, warmth, and insight.” ―Publishers Weekly
“A beautifully wrought, disconcerting collection.” ―Nell Porter Brown, Harvard Magazine
“I remember being told once that there are bioluminescent plankton; these stories remind me of that fantastic, startling and real illumination. The animal narrators are not mythic, or naive--they are psychologically full. And though the humans in these stories often act like beasts, having actual beasts tell the stories give the reader a broadened sense of what we affectionately term humanity.” ―Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
“I have been waiting, since Blood Kin, for another work of fiction by Ceridwen Dovey. Only the Animals is filled with knowledge and wisdom and beauty. It leaves a strange and striking trace on its reader.” ―Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
“The life stories related by these very civilized animals are in some cases touching (the elephant), in others amusing (the mussel), but all are absorbing. They are transmitted to us with a light touch and no trace of sentimentality.” ―J. M. Coetzee
“An audacious work of the imagination . . . An extraordinary series of fabulist tales . . . The yarns are funny, tragic, smart, arch, poignant and playful all at once.” ―The Saturday Age (Australia)
About the Author
Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in fifteen countries, short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Award, and selected for the U.S. National Book Foundation's prestigious 5 Under 35 honors list. The Wall Street Journal named her one of their "artists to watch." She studied social anthropology at Harvard and New York University, and now lives with her husband and son in Sydney. Only the Animals recently won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award.
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Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Only the animals can show us how human we are By Sally Howes I have never been a big fan of short stories - I have always liked the idea of them more than the actuality. This is the book that changed my mind. ONLY THE ANIMALS takes a uniquely interesting premise - a collection of short stories narrated by the souls of different animals who have experienced the great man-made conflicts, atrocities, and disasters of the past century or so - and fully delivers on its great potential. Every single story is intensely insightful and moving, quietly but emphatically displaying the dignity and compassion of which only the animals are capable. Mankind might dominate the world, but the animals are the ones who remind us just how human we really are.This is not to say that the stories aren't infused with a wonderful sense of playfulness and fun. After all, among other things, we are taken on a road trip (well, waterways trip) with a young mussel, we are taken into outer space with a tortoise, and we get to read a letter written posthumously by a dolphin to Sylvia Plath. Indeed, famous figures from history appear regularly throughout the stories, from Henry Lawson to Leo Tolstoy, Himmler to Virginia Woolf. As one of my favorite narrators from the stories comments, "It was at this time that he named me Plautus the Tortoise, after the Roman comic playwright who valued imagination and the fantastic above anything he could scavenge from real life." These values could also be said to exemplify Ceridwen Dovey, and neither time nor custom can stale the infinite variety of her stories.But the greatest strength of this collection of stories is the insight it gives into human nature, an insight that can only come from outside, an insight that only the animals can provide. While every story is very different from the others, they all share some important qualities. Each of the animal narrators has a quietly respectful sympathy for humans and an implacable honesty about what they see in the supposedly superior species. As Kiki-la-Doucette, the cat who finds herself comforting soldiers in the trenches in France in 1915, says, "... I identify with the refusal of mules to be anything they don't truly feel themselves to be. Humans tend to call this bad manners or lack of respect for authority, but I call it the highest form of authenticity." ONLY THE ANIMALS suggests an authenticity in animals that humans can only wonder at.From this position of authentic frankness, each of the animals in the stories observes humans in all their glory and all their unequalled depravity. Perhaps the most curious and wonderful thing, however, is that the animals' observations are invariably profound without being patronizing. They watch us with a moving tenderness, often appearing baffled by us but at the same time seeing us more clearly than we see ourselves. A chimpanzee named Red Peter gives an example of the piercing insight that so captivated me: "... the humans ... seem to think that what sets them apart from other animals is their ability to love, grieve, feel guilt, think abstractly, et cetera. They are misguided. What sets them apart is their talent for masochism. Therein lies their power. To take pleasure in pain, to derive strength from deprivation, is to be human."I believe the power of stories lies in their capacity to encourage us to ask questions about our world, our society, and our selves. With ONLY THE ANIMALS, Ceridwen Dovey has found an especially powerful means of asking questions about our humanity. I'll leave the last words on this to Sprout the dolphin, who narrates the penultimate story in this marvelous literary menagerie: "Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?"
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Animals and Writers, Animals as Writers By Tonstant Weader Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey is a rich and wonderful collection of ten short stories told by the souls of animals who died in human conflicts around the world. Anthropomorphic animals as fodder for authors is as old as Aesop and many of the authors who appear in these stories have written from the perspective of animals, too. But there is something new and fresh in these stories.Perhaps it is the structural framework that makes it so exciting. Each story has three elements in common, they are all told by the souls of self-aware animals who died in human conflicts and at least one great writer is part of the story one way or another. Within those limitations, Dovey demonstrates a limitless ability to imagine and to write.They are all connected to literature, to Kafka, to Tolstoy, to Hesse. My favorite story was told by a mollusk whose pre-World War II adventures sounded like a bivalve Kerouac “On the Boat” told with hilarious gusto as he travels from the Hudson River to Pearl Harbor. “The whole goal was detachment, gathering no algae, freewheeling…we would talk all the time about how we would practice non-attachment while depending on our survival on attaching to a base with our byssus threads.” If you can read that story without laughing, you’ve never read On the Road.Some of the stories take your heart and crush it. The story of the twin elephants who died in a civil war in Mozambique is magical, beautiful and heartbreaking. The US military-trained dolphin who writes a letter to Sylvia Plath broke my heart. Then, there’s the Zelig-like tortoise who goes from Tolstoy to Virginia Woolf to George Orwell (from whom he runs away) to the Soviet Space Program and whose placid wisdom is entrancing. There is Colette’s cat, accidentally left behind at the Front of World War who always felt she was a tom, not a she-cat or Goering’s German Shepherd whose Siddhartha-inspired self-mythology identifies with Fenris the Wolf of Norse mythology. They inhabit, in a way, their writers as well as their animal nature.Why these stories succeed so well as these animals who are self-aware, who are well-read and oh-so-literate also remain animals. Their animal nature remains true, except perhaps for the chimpanzee, our genetic cousin, who is trying to become human.Dovey skillfully adapts her writing style to the different animals and authors. From beat poet to ancient fable, the writing styles vary widely, but feel so very authentic for each animal narrator. She also explores the different reasons people will write from the animal perspective, whether to ask what it means to be human, to show that we too are merely animals, or to say the unsayable, the unthinkable by putting those words in the mouths of animals.I enjoyed this book very much. It made me laugh. More often it made me sad, sometimes it even made me cry for these animals we use and risk and exploit in our wars, whose lives we value so much and then so little whether it’s pampering them as pets and abandoning them in crisis or spending years and small fortunes training them only to send them to their deaths. Our relationship with animals reveals so much about us and these stories, told by animals killed in our wars are telling us truths we might not want to hear. We should listen.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Wonderful Writing, Fast Flowing read By D. K. Nestor Great writing, great read and a dazzling concept. The book will be enjoyed by literature lovers along with animal and history hobbyists. Anyone who likes animals will surely enjoy this work.I enjoyed the author's writing so much I ordered Blood Kin. Hope to see more of her amazing work soon.
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