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The Last Animal

por Abby Geni

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687385,789 (3.97)6
A remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life.
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Mostrando 1-5 de 7 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
It is rare that I like every story in a short story collection, but here we are (that may not be true...the copy I was reading had pages missing in the middle of the last story so it's possible that was the one I wouldn't like). Geni's writing is poetic and easy to read, and every story is emotional and a little bit fantastic.
( )
  katebrarian | Jul 28, 2020 |
A little uneven. A few of these short stories are really wonderful and thought-provoking, but a few others just leave me wondering what I missed, because they seem so pointless. ( )
  BraveNewBks | Mar 10, 2016 |
There are some very heavy themes in these lovely stories, to the point where the collection should maybe come with a warning label. If you have an emotional trigger, it will probably be hit by one of the stories. ( )
  lexmccall | Sep 3, 2014 |
A collection of short stories, many having an animal or other creature as a central focus. One of the stories included, "Captivity", about a young woman suddenly contacted by her long-missing brother's weird girlfriend, won a prize from Glimmer Train and it's one of the best in the book. I liked another, "The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr", about a favorite counselor at a summer camp who goes missing and the group of twelve year-old girls who try to figure out what happened.

The writing is fine and a couple of the stories involve interesting settings, like a Museum of Natural History. The reason I rated this book with three stars was because of the unrelenting misery, something that many young writers see as being Serious. Each story, without exception, tells of varying degrees of suffering: the little boy who discovers his father's infidelity, the teenager boyfriend who manipulates his girlfriend through suicide attempts, brain cancer, Alzheimer's...
It actually wasn't a tough read, but it got monotonous after realizing that there wouldn't be any variation. ( )
  mstrust | Apr 2, 2014 |
Before I was halfway through my review copy this book, I knew I'd found an author to add to my top tier of favorites. This debut collection of short stories is absolutely wonderful.

If it weren't for the publisher's description, I'm not sure I would have noticed that animals and nature were a common theme in these stories. But that piece of marketing was what piqued my interest in the book, so I'm not going to criticize it. A more obvious common theme might be loss; loved ones are missing or deceased, marriages are defunct, a baby is lost through miscarriage, families are estranged. But pointing to that as a common theme sounds dreary, and these stories are anything but dreary. There is life and hope in all of them; their characters are undefeated by their pain and loss. But that isn't to say that these stories are saccharine or self-consciously "uplifting," either. Geni's writing is intelligent, hard-edged, artistic, boldly creative, and a delight to read.

In terms of comparing Geni to other authors, nothing comes to my mind beyond some of the "usual suspects" of great short fiction: Chekhov, Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, and so on. Geni certainly has her own voice as a writer, but I wouldn't say there's anything pyrotechnically unique about her style. Rather, the strength of her work is in its execution; in all the fine points of plotting, character, setting, description, elegant prose. She has a flair for descriptive phrases that had me smiling at the page again and again, and she also has a wonderful skill at balancing the often contradictory forces of inventiveness and realism.

I don't think capsuled plot descriptions would do justice to the stories in this book (and those have been done elsewhere anyway), so I won't take you on a march through the table of contents. A couple of stories do beg for some comment, however:

In "Captivity," as with several other stories, Geni explores the connections that bond people and animals. The protagonist is dealing with the unexplained disappearance of her brother, and she finds neither comfort nor even a basic level of communication with the people who share the tragedy with her. Instead, her solace comes from her relationship with what would seem the least likely of animal companions: an octopus she cares for at a public aquarium. In a completely charming scene, she takes the octopus from its tank and carries it around, giving it a tour of the outside world:
"Out in the hallway his attention was thoroughly absorbed by a fire alarm box, its plastic surface, the handle he couldn't reach through the glass. I allowed him to trail one tentacle over the dusty carpet. He would not let go of me, and the red didn't entirely leave his skin, but his eyes didn't stop roving for a moment and his tentacles were hungry for every new surface."

"Landscaping" is a story of only six pages, and yet is a work of stabbing intensity. Flying through decades of a woman's life, it touches down for brief moments, shows us those moments in precise, exquisitely drawn detail, and then flies on. The story told is a tragic one, but the first-person narrator tells it without the tiniest grain of self-pity, and the effect is simply devastating.

For sensitive, imaginative, beautifully-written short stories, you can't do better than this collection. ( )
  KarlBunker | Mar 30, 2014 |
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A remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life.

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