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Bestiary

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The poet K-Ming Chang's debut novel, Bestiary , offers up a different kind of narrative, full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter - and all the things in between.

I went in cold, as is my preference, and really struggled for the first 80 pages until the title chapter "Bestiary" which began to really hook me in. Chang has a way of describing the forces of attraction which seem like a new language, written in the lover's bones. The same character for blue (青, chīng) can be combined with the character fo sky (天, tiān) to mean sky (青天, chīngtiān) and so the sky is blue.Caspar Henderson's The Book of Barely Imagined Beings [17] ( Granta 2012, University of Chicago Press 2013), subtitled "A 21st Century Bestiary", explores how humans imagine animals in a time of rapid environmental change.

A kind of encyclopedia of animals, the bestiary was among the most popular illuminated texts in northern Europe during the Middle Ages (about 500–1500). While the Taiwanese cultural elements were accurate and refreshing, unfortunately some aspects of this book didn't work for me. I could spend all day marvelling at Chang's prose; these are sentences you want to climb inside, relish, and read again and again just for the pleasure of the language. The bestiary in the Queen Mary Psalter is found in the "marginal" decorations that occupy about the bottom quarter of the page, and are unusually extensive and coherent in this work. I don’t see footnoting incorporated into fictional narratives quite like it was used here and it was amazing!Here are two of the beasts, then, just in the first couple of pages — Grandmother, whose violence never makes Agong's memories resurface, and Agong's skull full of snakes, snakes which awaken Agong's body to his former occupation as a soldier and make him act out his flashbacks. There is a lot of imagery of body parts and bodily fluids, as well as a decent amount of violence and crude language. So you get to learn the motivations of each character through their own eyes, even as you see them through the others’. But when I was two-thirds in, I realized this isn’t just a Taiwanese American novel, but also a retelling of Tayal fables (Tayal are a Taiwanese indigenous people, 泰雅族), strung together with common themes, told in English but are really also in Chinese (mostly Mandarin, but Taiwanese sort of helps).

her debut novel interrogates not just generational trauma, but also generational myth: the mediums it inhabits (oral, written, the natural world as it is infringed upon by human inventions like war) and the ways it is both muddied and thrown into sharp relief by migration, by desire, by destruction. He is currently completing a book of creative critical 'chronicles', and preparing translations of Guillaume Apollinaire and Roland Barthes. The author describes it as "part migration story, part mythological retelling, part queer love story. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.The description was then often accompanied by an artistic illustration of the animal as described in the bestiary. In addition, the well-known characteristics associated with numerous beasts—the unicorn, the elephant, and the fox, among others—were effortlessly appropriated for secular works made for the elite realm of the court. Even after half a century - and counting - as a professional zoologist, I encountered new and intriguing facts on every page, all conveyed in an easy, friendly style. The author also incorporates violent impulses to illustrate the generational trauma and at the same time, unfolds layers of buried (literally and figuratively) secrets of the entire lineage. Even beyond the European Christian tradition, the use of animals as allegories for human virtues and vices was a widespread phenomenon that underscores the capacity of beasts to serve as moral exemplars.

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