We the Animals--A Reivew

We the Animals is the debut novel from Justin Torres, graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

This book is a collection of snippets from the life of a boy in New York--the son of a white mother and a Puerto Rican father--and how he and his two brothers cope with a volatile childhood.

The writing here is exquisite. Torres writes simply in places, but in others he winds sentences out like ribbon, delicately put together and beautifully executed. He distills images down to their bare bones, so we're left with the essence of a scene, without the excess that so many beginning writers succumb to.

I have only one complaint about this book, and that is the abruptness with which we are introduced into the boys' older selves. Two thirds of the book describes their lives as children and then somewhat suddenly we are thrust into their teenage and young adult lives. The transition was a bit jarring for me.

Despite this small blip, however, We the Animals is a fantastic first offering from a bright new voice in fiction.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon--A Review

Big game hunter Jim Corbett published Man-Eaters of Kumaon in 1944. The book is a collection of stories of his hunting conquests in the northern part of India.

In the 1930s this northern area of the subcontinent was plagued with attacks by man-eating tigers. When the local government could not kill the tigers, they called on Jim Corbett. He was known for being able to track and kill even the most wiley game.

Corbett's writing is urgent and exciting (in an old-school British kind of way--which is even more delightful, in my opinion). When describing a hunt, the reader feels as though she is there with Corbett, watching his back as he creeps through a jungle ravine, reading signs that only he can see. He often refers to "listening to the jungle folk," by which he means the animals of the jungle. Often, before beginning a hunt, he would pick a nice shady tree to sit under and just listen to the birds and animals to hear what they had to say about what was happening in the jungle that day.

While the stories Corbett tells are breathtaking, they sometime describe terrible deaths, either of humans or of the tigers themselves. Corbett explains that tigers aren't naturally man-eaters. Something has to drive them to hunt humans. Usually the catalyst is old age or a festering injury, something that forces the tiger to go after easier game. This knowledge makes the stories of his kills even sadder. He describes going after these tigers with such tenderness, such a respect for them, that it breaks your heart when he tells of how they die. 

Corbett was, despite his reputation has a big game hunter, an avid conservationist, in an age when conservation wasn't much on the minds of people. He says in the book that he'd much rather shoot a tiger with a camera than with a gun. The last story in the book tells of his attempts to capture an image of a tiger, how he uses his skills as a hunter to stalk a group of tigers over many days and many miles. It leaves the reader with a sense of hope, an image of a man with a camera rather than a man with a gun.

The only drawback to this book (and it's a small one) is that the stories of him hunting the man-eaters are all very similar. A tiger starts picking people off in a remote village, they either try to kill the tiger or are too afraid to even go looking for any remains of the victims, they call Corbett, he comes to the rescue, he stalks the tiger and eventually kills it. The stories are so exciting, however, that one barely notices the repetition. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The Idiot Who Parked Next to Me in the Maryland Avenue Garage Last Week--A Review

Usually, a review contains both positive and negatives aspects of a performance, work of literature, etc. I am, however, having trouble finding anything positive to report about the parking job that was executed in the space next to mine last Thursday.

The driver of this SUV started their run of poor parking judgement by parking their giant, gas-guzzling behemoth in a spot clearly labeled COMPACT. I have seen this phenomenon before, but have overlooked it when the parking job was done with careful consideration of the actual compact cars parked nearby. This person, however, had no such consideration. Not only were they parked in a spot clearly too small for their vehicle, they also parked so crookedly that I, parked in the space next to them, was forced to walk around my car on the passenger side and go around the front of my car to get to the driver's side door. The right corner of the bumper of said behemoth was, by my rough estimate, three or four inches from the left corner of my bumper. This, of course, meant that on the other side of their vehicle, they'd taken up a corner of the adjacent parking space, rendering it useless for anyone else.

I won't comment on the blatant disrespect this driver appears to show for the rest of humanity. Perhaps they were late for class and they had an important, life-altering test to take and had no time to stop, back up, and correct their disaster of a parking job. Perhaps they suffer from a condition in which they cannot tell when they've parked like a jackass. Who am I to say? All I can do is report what I see. I will say, however, that they didn't hit my car when they performed this profound display of ineptitude. There's that, at least.