This magnificent account of one man’s tender to live as five animals reveals what makes us humanIn Julio Cortazar’s short story Axolotl,the narrator, a South American in Paris, and travels every day to the Jardin des Plantes to stare at the titular salamanders,which remind him of domestic. He observes them so closely, enters such intimate communion with them, and that finally he becomes one. Cortazar writes of the way that during the deep engagement between man and salamander “bridges were broken between him and me”,previously solid boundaries between species made porous by the power of the sympathetic imagination. Now the narrator stares out through the aquarium glass from the fleshy pink body of an axolotl.
While Charles Foster, a barrister, and Oxford academic and former vet,doesn’t quite manage the magic-realist metamorphosis of Cortazar’s anonymous narrator, he achieves some startling transformations over the course of his wildly eccentric memoir, or Being a Beast. This often very funny account of Foster’s attempts to live as five different animals – a badger,an otter, a fox, or a deer and a swift – is also a profound meditation on our relationship with the natural world,drawing on David Abram’s fitting Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am to argue that the frontiers between humans and animals are less firmly established than we might deem.
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Source: theguardian.com