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The Bestiary
From “a writer of remarkable gifts,” “Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny—the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark.
Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.
Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.
Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.
Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.
307 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
19 people are currently reading
825 people want to read
About the author
Nicholas Christopher
36 books176 followersNicholas Christopher was born and raised in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. Afterward, he traveled and lived in Europe. He became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in his early twenties, and began publishing his work in other leading magazines, both in the United States and abroad, including Esquire, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Paris Review 50th Anniversary Anthology, the Best American Poetry, Poet's Choice, the Everyman's Library Poems of New York and Conversation Pieces, the Norton Anthology of Love, the Faber Book of Movie Verse, and the Grand Street Reader. He has edited two major anthologies himself, Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989) and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (Scribner, 1994) and has translated Martial and Catullus and several modern Greek poets, including George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos. His books have been translated and published many other countries, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from various institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Yale, Barnard College, and New York University, and is now a Professor on the permanent faculty of the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Constance Christopher, and continues to travel widely, most frequently to Venice, the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and the Grenadines.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 155 reviews
February 16, 2009
nicholas christopher has written one of my favorite books (trip to the stars) and one of my least favorite books (veronica) and this one is right in the middle. it starts out very strong; i thought it was going to be a sweeping family drama in the vein of middlesex or piano mans daughter, but then there was a turn and there were too many little quirks and weaknesses in the writing that bothered me. there were tons of cameo characters who entered, were overdescribed, and then wandered away from the narrative never to return. too many loose ends where formerly important characters just faded out. too many instances where declarations were made like "but he never would see her again", or "little did he know then what an influence this would have"... (this is known as katherine neville syndrome)its good but it makes me wonder why of all his books, its trip to the stars that is out of print. come on!
February 23, 2017
Rating: 4.875* of five
The Publisher Says: From "a writer of remarkable gifts," "Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny--the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah's Ark.
Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother's strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother's early death and his stern father's long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father's activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark--griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks--the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.
Xeno's quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe--but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.
My Review: Sometimes a book just comes at you from nowhere. Unannounced, something about a particular work will summon something unexpected from its reader, something that feels important and shifts an atom or a molecule from left to right, from up to down.
“The Bestiary” did something like that for me. I began it with some small sense of its potential. I read Nicholas Christopher's novel “Veronica” earlier this decade, and was left with the feeling that I was about two-thirds of the way to a real experience, and left stranded by that last piece of unexplored territory between me and glory. What good writing, what good storytelling, what a letdown. I hoped for equally good writing and storytelling, plus a completeness I wasn't experiencing in “Veronica.”
Xeno Atlas begins the story of his life with the memorable observation, “The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.” Urgh, I though, another “my-father-failed-me” story. Still, there is so much in that sentence. There is menace and foreboding, and the foreshadowed sighting of more beasts. Continue, I told my cynical inner reader.
Lucky me, he did. Xeno tells us of his life as the left-behind son of a widowed Cretan sailor father, raised by his Sicilian maternal grandmother and Albanian nurse. The grandmother, we learn, is the granddaughter of a shape-shifting dryad; the old lady appears to become a red fox. The nurse is the closest thing to a normal person in the house, and her lovingkindness becomes a rock for Xeno's growing-up years. When, as is inevitable, the grandmother dies, Xeno is sent to boarding school in the wilds of Maine. It is here he will begin to come to terms with his father's indifference to him, and will discover the first traces of the Caravan Bestiary, the lost half of the universal bestiary that God used in creating the world. During the Flood, it appears that Noah got only one bestiary to guide his selection of animals, and the other animals were, it would seem, not pleasing to God and therefore to be abandoned. The Caravan Bestiary is the book recording their existence: Manticores, rukhs, griffins, gargoyles, sphinxes...all to be wiped out. Somehow that did not happen, and the Caravan Bestiary was proof of the survival of these terrifying other creatures.
Xeno begins a life-long quest for the Caravan Bestiary that takes him to every corner of the world. It is during his tour of duty in Vietnam that he re-connects with his boarding-school teacher who first mentioned the Bestiary to him. The vital clues that set Xeno traveling purposefully on the trail of this ancient book are discovered in a Hawaiian library, of all places. Xeno spends several more years chasing down clues and traveling across the Mediterranean several times, coping along the way with the loves and losses of any man in his twenties. His father dies; he learns the truth about his mother's family when he visits Sicily for the first time, and encounters for the last time his beloved red fox; he reignites and relishes his childhood love for Lena, a woman closer than a sister could ever be; finally, finally Xeno grows into the man we're rooting for him to become in his practical and urgent help for the real, living animals of Africa as he uses his inheritance to save endangered animals from certain death.
As if in reward, God (or whoever) brings Xeno to a church where he discovers so much more than he expected to find, and yet never actually beholds his longed-for prize of the Caravan Bestiary. What he finds is, without giving anything away, even better, even more surprising, and far more than he has any right to hope he will ever see.
I recommend this book to anyone who felt “The Da Vinci Code” was too facile and longs for a quest novel that will actually satisfy the real basis of the quest myth: “Know thyself.” I read this book, and at the end, I think I did know myself just a little bit better. I too am Xeno Atlas.
The Publisher Says: From "a writer of remarkable gifts," "Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny--the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah's Ark.
Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother's strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother's early death and his stern father's long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father's activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark--griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks--the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.
Xeno's quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe--but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.
My Review: Sometimes a book just comes at you from nowhere. Unannounced, something about a particular work will summon something unexpected from its reader, something that feels important and shifts an atom or a molecule from left to right, from up to down.
“The Bestiary” did something like that for me. I began it with some small sense of its potential. I read Nicholas Christopher's novel “Veronica” earlier this decade, and was left with the feeling that I was about two-thirds of the way to a real experience, and left stranded by that last piece of unexplored territory between me and glory. What good writing, what good storytelling, what a letdown. I hoped for equally good writing and storytelling, plus a completeness I wasn't experiencing in “Veronica.”
Xeno Atlas begins the story of his life with the memorable observation, “The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.” Urgh, I though, another “my-father-failed-me” story. Still, there is so much in that sentence. There is menace and foreboding, and the foreshadowed sighting of more beasts. Continue, I told my cynical inner reader.
Lucky me, he did. Xeno tells us of his life as the left-behind son of a widowed Cretan sailor father, raised by his Sicilian maternal grandmother and Albanian nurse. The grandmother, we learn, is the granddaughter of a shape-shifting dryad; the old lady appears to become a red fox. The nurse is the closest thing to a normal person in the house, and her lovingkindness becomes a rock for Xeno's growing-up years. When, as is inevitable, the grandmother dies, Xeno is sent to boarding school in the wilds of Maine. It is here he will begin to come to terms with his father's indifference to him, and will discover the first traces of the Caravan Bestiary, the lost half of the universal bestiary that God used in creating the world. During the Flood, it appears that Noah got only one bestiary to guide his selection of animals, and the other animals were, it would seem, not pleasing to God and therefore to be abandoned. The Caravan Bestiary is the book recording their existence: Manticores, rukhs, griffins, gargoyles, sphinxes...all to be wiped out. Somehow that did not happen, and the Caravan Bestiary was proof of the survival of these terrifying other creatures.
Xeno begins a life-long quest for the Caravan Bestiary that takes him to every corner of the world. It is during his tour of duty in Vietnam that he re-connects with his boarding-school teacher who first mentioned the Bestiary to him. The vital clues that set Xeno traveling purposefully on the trail of this ancient book are discovered in a Hawaiian library, of all places. Xeno spends several more years chasing down clues and traveling across the Mediterranean several times, coping along the way with the loves and losses of any man in his twenties. His father dies; he learns the truth about his mother's family when he visits Sicily for the first time, and encounters for the last time his beloved red fox; he reignites and relishes his childhood love for Lena, a woman closer than a sister could ever be; finally, finally Xeno grows into the man we're rooting for him to become in his practical and urgent help for the real, living animals of Africa as he uses his inheritance to save endangered animals from certain death.
As if in reward, God (or whoever) brings Xeno to a church where he discovers so much more than he expected to find, and yet never actually beholds his longed-for prize of the Caravan Bestiary. What he finds is, without giving anything away, even better, even more surprising, and far more than he has any right to hope he will ever see.
I recommend this book to anyone who felt “The Da Vinci Code” was too facile and longs for a quest novel that will actually satisfy the real basis of the quest myth: “Know thyself.” I read this book, and at the end, I think I did know myself just a little bit better. I too am Xeno Atlas.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 7, 2020
Different from my expectations this was neither a fantasy nor an adventure story, but rather a combination of a coming-of-age novel and the description of a historical research for a lost book.
The writing is beautiful, but the description of all the historical documents took out any suspense and almost turned the book in a texbook.
I liked it, but would only recommend it to the historical anf theological interested reader. 3 stars.
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Ausgehend vom Cover und dem Klappentext hatte ich eine Fantasygeschichte oder so eine Art Verschwörungsthriller erwartet. Diese Erwartung hat sich jedoch in keiner Weise erfüllt.
In dieser Geschichte begleiten wir den jungen Xeno Atlas von frühester Kindheit an bis er Ende 20 ist.
Die Beschreibung seiner Lebensumstände, seiner Familie und seines Heranwachsens hat mir sehr gefallen.
Nachdem er das College beendet hat, begibt er sich jedoch auf die Suche nach dem sog. Karawanenbuch, das seit dem 12. Jahrhunder verschollen ist. Diese Suche ist jedoch vorwiegend als historische Forschungsarbeit beschrieben. Da ich keine Historikerin bin, fand ich das etwas mühsam zu lesen und nicht sonderlich spannend.
An manchen Stellen gab es leichte Anmutungen von magischem Realismus, aber als Fantasy würde ich es ganz bestimmt nicht kategorisieren.
Die Sprache ist sehr schön und der Stil eher anspruchsvoll. Man benötigt als Leser auch Konzentration und muss genau lesen, um keine Details zu verpassen.
Vor allem der erste Teil bis zum Beginn der eigentlichen Suche hat mir als coming-of-age Geschichte wirklich gut gefallen.
Insgesamt bewerte ich mit 3 Sternen.
The writing is beautiful, but the description of all the historical documents took out any suspense and almost turned the book in a texbook.
I liked it, but would only recommend it to the historical anf theological interested reader. 3 stars.
----------------------------------------
Ausgehend vom Cover und dem Klappentext hatte ich eine Fantasygeschichte oder so eine Art Verschwörungsthriller erwartet. Diese Erwartung hat sich jedoch in keiner Weise erfüllt.
In dieser Geschichte begleiten wir den jungen Xeno Atlas von frühester Kindheit an bis er Ende 20 ist.
Die Beschreibung seiner Lebensumstände, seiner Familie und seines Heranwachsens hat mir sehr gefallen.
Nachdem er das College beendet hat, begibt er sich jedoch auf die Suche nach dem sog. Karawanenbuch, das seit dem 12. Jahrhunder verschollen ist. Diese Suche ist jedoch vorwiegend als historische Forschungsarbeit beschrieben. Da ich keine Historikerin bin, fand ich das etwas mühsam zu lesen und nicht sonderlich spannend.
An manchen Stellen gab es leichte Anmutungen von magischem Realismus, aber als Fantasy würde ich es ganz bestimmt nicht kategorisieren.
Die Sprache ist sehr schön und der Stil eher anspruchsvoll. Man benötigt als Leser auch Konzentration und muss genau lesen, um keine Details zu verpassen.
Vor allem der erste Teil bis zum Beginn der eigentlichen Suche hat mir als coming-of-age Geschichte wirklich gut gefallen.
Insgesamt bewerte ich mit 3 Sternen.
June 3, 2019
When I was a wee tyke, I had several stuffed toys. My favourite was a simple stuffed cut-out of Tweety-Bird. I carried him around until the stuffing fell out, and truly Tweety was never the same after he went into the wash. I recall longing wistfully for him for many years thereafter. I think in many respects that hankering went into SF and fantasy novels in my teens: that evocation of another world so terribly terribly tantalising to a boy out of place in the real world, and searching for his identity.
Why am I telling you this? Well, in this book, the protangonist, Xeno, goes searching for an ancient manuscript known as “The Caravan Bestiary”, a book of lost beasts that were left to their fate in the Flood. He has another link with the tale of the Flood though. Like Noah, his father is also a seaman, and is largely absent from his life, both due to his work and to his blaming Xeno for the death of his wife (Xeno’s mother) in childbirth. There is a ship later and indeed an animal rescue of sorts.
Xeno makes strides in his quest for the lost bestiary, but more than anything, he is searching for his parents. It is no accident that Nicholas has the quest take him to his mother’s village in Italy and his father’s in Greece. Nor that his quest should be started by a father-figure, and aided at one point by a maternal one.
The publisher’s blurb of this novel suggests that it might be of the same ilk as The Da Vinci Code. Thankfully it is not. Yes, there is indeed that search for a lost manuscript, but the novel is more bildungsroman than it is mystery thriller. There are no car chases, no albino monks, and research is done the old fashioned way: leafing through hundreds and thousands of archived books in public libraries.
The blurb suggests that it is a fantasy. It certainly flirts with this, but any fantasy in it is closer to magic realism than to genre fantasy. We get hints of a magical world:
The tale is limned with this faint glow of the faeric, and the best passages meld a melancholy wistfulness with a child’s hankering for a twilight world of magic. Sort of like my quest for Tweety long after he underwent his own Flood and did not quite survive.
Also reviewed by The Washington Post
Why am I telling you this? Well, in this book, the protangonist, Xeno, goes searching for an ancient manuscript known as “The Caravan Bestiary”, a book of lost beasts that were left to their fate in the Flood. He has another link with the tale of the Flood though. Like Noah, his father is also a seaman, and is largely absent from his life, both due to his work and to his blaming Xeno for the death of his wife (Xeno’s mother) in childbirth. There is a ship later and indeed an animal rescue of sorts.
Xeno makes strides in his quest for the lost bestiary, but more than anything, he is searching for his parents. It is no accident that Nicholas has the quest take him to his mother’s village in Italy and his father’s in Greece. Nor that his quest should be started by a father-figure, and aided at one point by a maternal one.
The publisher’s blurb of this novel suggests that it might be of the same ilk as The Da Vinci Code. Thankfully it is not. Yes, there is indeed that search for a lost manuscript, but the novel is more bildungsroman than it is mystery thriller. There are no car chases, no albino monks, and research is done the old fashioned way: leafing through hundreds and thousands of archived books in public libraries.
The blurb suggests that it is a fantasy. It certainly flirts with this, but any fantasy in it is closer to magic realism than to genre fantasy. We get hints of a magical world:
On countless nights after tucking me in, my grandmother retired to her bed and told me animal stories, punctuated by sound effects, out of the darkness …Late one night, after she finished one of her stories, the stray headlight of a passing car shone through the window and I was stunned to see, not my grandmother, but a red fox, with a ring of white fur around its neck, stretched out on her bed.But only hints:
I cried out…A moment later, the lamp came on and there was my grandmother, sitting up in bed. She was wearing a red nightdress, with a white shawl around her shoulders. “It’s all right, child,” she murmured, coming over and laying her palm against my cheek. “You were dreaming.”Throughout the novel, Xeno has more almost-encounters with fabulous creatures: the Peryton, birds with the head and hindlegs of a deer, and which are souls of soldiers destroyed by war, glimpsed after his stint in the Vietnam War; the red fox once again, when he returns to the Sicilian village of his grandmother’s family.
The tale is limned with this faint glow of the faeric, and the best passages meld a melancholy wistfulness with a child’s hankering for a twilight world of magic. Sort of like my quest for Tweety long after he underwent his own Flood and did not quite survive.
Also reviewed by The Washington Post
October 11, 2011
I happened upon The Bestiary a few weeks ago, and was blown away. This book is underknown. Nicholas Christopher is underknown! This should not be the case. He's an amazing writer on a cellular level - each sentence is a work of art - and on a conceptual level. This book is a bibliophile's wet dream. A guy hunts a long lost Bestiary, the Caravan Bestiary, to be precise, which purportedly depicts all the animals who did not make it onto Noah's ark. For a relatively slender book, the story is wide ranging. Hawaii, Vietnam, Brooklyn, Greece. It absolutely kills. If you have interest in anything lit-history, or lit-mystery, you're going to adore this. Think Geraldine Brooks' amazing bibliophile mystery People of the Bookmeets Herodotus.
April 17, 2010
This book was excellent. I wish it had been a thicker book with more about the mythological creatures. I think Nicholas Christopher could have devloped this story even more. Having said that, I really enjoyed it!
August 29, 2007
Nicholas Christopher is on the list of authors that I don’t understand why he’s not more popular amongst fantasy fans. Probably because he is firmly in the literary camp and thus ignored by most genre people. It’s a pity because he writes good fantasy of history. A literary omnivore (which I always appreciate), he is versed in classical lore and pulp fiction, and his books are a thrilling amalgam of the two: erudite, lyrical and breathlessly paced. Unlike Christopher’s previous novels, The Bestiary merely teeters on the edge of fantasy. But it teeters in such a delightful way.
The Bestiary concerns a medieval manuscript with a whiff of heresy, suppressed and possibly destroyed by order of the pope. And the story is primarily that of a fable. The main character’s – Xeno - hunt for this bestiary is quixotic — it is, he soon realizes, a thinly veiled quest for his own identity — and the novel is less a detective story than a kind of theme and variations on the failure of man’s dominion over nature.
I recommend folks read this book, I also really recommend going out and finding Veronica and A Trip to the Stars, which are on my must list of book recommendations.
The Bestiary concerns a medieval manuscript with a whiff of heresy, suppressed and possibly destroyed by order of the pope. And the story is primarily that of a fable. The main character’s – Xeno - hunt for this bestiary is quixotic — it is, he soon realizes, a thinly veiled quest for his own identity — and the novel is less a detective story than a kind of theme and variations on the failure of man’s dominion over nature.
I recommend folks read this book, I also really recommend going out and finding Veronica and A Trip to the Stars, which are on my must list of book recommendations.
January 1, 2023
my 2nd nicholas christopher book! im obsessed w trip to the stars and this was also a compelling, long winding road of a story. but it was a lot slower paced then i would prefer, with an abrupt ending imo but it was interesting! reads as a non-fiction biography/historical tale with elements of magic (which i wish there was more of) overall, enjoyable!
November 22, 2024
This book was not what I expected. It was more of a coming of age novel with no magical creatures, just information about them. A search for a book. It was not a bad book, but I was expecting something along the lines of " a trip to the stars "
July 24, 2010
I loved, loved, loved this book! Even if I didn't thoroughly enjoy the story itself, I would give it 5 stars for Nicholas Christopher's evocative prose alone. In addition to his 5 excellent novels, Christopher has penned 8 books of poetry as well as editing 2 highly regarded anthologies of poetry. That talent shines on every page of The Bestiary.
Xeno Atlas is a lonely boy whose mother died giving him birth, leaving him in the "care" of an emotionally vacant father who spends most of his life at sea aboard freighters. Xeno's only real joy comes from the stories of fantastical creatures told by his maternal grandmother, herself a mysteriously shape-shifting descendant of mountain people who once inhabited the remote forests of Sicily. These nightly tales inspire a driving passion in Xeno to seek a legendary book, the Caravan Bestiary, which chronicled the bizarre and ultimately damned creatures who were denied passage on Noah's ark when the flood waters rose. It was said those possessing this book were heretics, madmen, renegades...if, indeed, the book ever existed at all.
Along the way, Xeno travels to points near and far, has nerve-wracking adventures, encounters intriguing people who aid him in his quest, falls in and out of love, comes face-to-face with his own past and that of his lost family. It's the best kind of "coming of age" story!
If you enjoy magic realism, mythology, evocative travel writing, and simply such achingly beautiful prose it makes you want to live within the page, then you will love The Bestiary.
Xeno Atlas is a lonely boy whose mother died giving him birth, leaving him in the "care" of an emotionally vacant father who spends most of his life at sea aboard freighters. Xeno's only real joy comes from the stories of fantastical creatures told by his maternal grandmother, herself a mysteriously shape-shifting descendant of mountain people who once inhabited the remote forests of Sicily. These nightly tales inspire a driving passion in Xeno to seek a legendary book, the Caravan Bestiary, which chronicled the bizarre and ultimately damned creatures who were denied passage on Noah's ark when the flood waters rose. It was said those possessing this book were heretics, madmen, renegades...if, indeed, the book ever existed at all.
Along the way, Xeno travels to points near and far, has nerve-wracking adventures, encounters intriguing people who aid him in his quest, falls in and out of love, comes face-to-face with his own past and that of his lost family. It's the best kind of "coming of age" story!
If you enjoy magic realism, mythology, evocative travel writing, and simply such achingly beautiful prose it makes you want to live within the page, then you will love The Bestiary.
February 7, 2008
I picked this up at random in the library because I liked the synopsis and the cover, and it turned out to be outstanding. A lonely young man becomes obsessed with mythical or spiritual animals, and begins a quest for a lost, legendary bestiary.
Christopher's writing is a little choppy, and it bothered me at first -- the sentences were like this. And sometimes I wondered why he wrote so many fragments. The book is for grown-ups. Not a Magic Tree House book. Grown-ups can read longer sentences. But eventually I got used to it. And went with the flow. Because it started setting the rhythm for the story and in spite of the choppiness, Christopher actually writes quites well.
It's packed with animal imagery in a way that you'd think would be contrived, but it actually works. Christopher's hero covers a lot of ground, from Brooklyn to Vietnam, Hawaii, Venice, Sicily, Greece, and beyond, and the book is layered with bibliophilia, philosophical concerns about what animals mean to us, compelling characters, and picaresque "maybe supernatural but maybe not" moments. Some readers have complained that it contains too much boring book-hunting detective work, but I actually found it lighter on that than I expected. And the ending was entirely satisfying. I'm still digesting all the ideas that were packed into this, but it's not a polemic novel -- it tells a compelling and entertaining story.
I will definitely pick up more by Christopher.
Christopher's writing is a little choppy, and it bothered me at first -- the sentences were like this. And sometimes I wondered why he wrote so many fragments. The book is for grown-ups. Not a Magic Tree House book. Grown-ups can read longer sentences. But eventually I got used to it. And went with the flow. Because it started setting the rhythm for the story and in spite of the choppiness, Christopher actually writes quites well.
It's packed with animal imagery in a way that you'd think would be contrived, but it actually works. Christopher's hero covers a lot of ground, from Brooklyn to Vietnam, Hawaii, Venice, Sicily, Greece, and beyond, and the book is layered with bibliophilia, philosophical concerns about what animals mean to us, compelling characters, and picaresque "maybe supernatural but maybe not" moments. Some readers have complained that it contains too much boring book-hunting detective work, but I actually found it lighter on that than I expected. And the ending was entirely satisfying. I'm still digesting all the ideas that were packed into this, but it's not a polemic novel -- it tells a compelling and entertaining story.
I will definitely pick up more by Christopher.
July 18, 2007
nicholas christopher's books are not-so guilty pleasures of mine. not-so guilty because they're just so much fun to read -- effortlessly beautiful page-turning prose following an intellectual (usually arcane) quest. he's quietly building a unique body of work. if you're the kind of person who wanted less action and more book-browsing in far-flung libraries in Raiders of the Lost Ark (which isn't to say ROTLA isn't one of the most perfect movies ever), his books might appeal to you, especially this one, featuring conscipuously named characters like Xeno Atlas, the protagonist, and his lifelong search (1950s - 80s) from the Bronx to Paris to Venice to Crete for an obscure illuminated book called the Caravan Bestiary. legend holds this book contains descriptions of all the animals that failed to make it on to noah's ark. it may not be powerfully deep in the end, but reading this is mostly about sumptuous intellectual escapism in the hands of a wonderful imagination. i'd also recommend
A Trip to the Stars
by christopher. his poetry books are good too.
June 4, 2015
I kept reading all the way to the last word to find out what happened to Xeno and his quest for the Caravan Bestiary. Nicholas Christopher is a wonderful writer. I have been to some of the places in the book and his words made me feel like I was transported back there. I could smell the rain in the forest in Italy, feel the dust blowing against my ankles walking up the cobblestones…
That being said, this book made me furious. I threw it across the room after I finished and screamed some things my mom would still wash my mouth out if she heard. Why? Because it could have been a great book. The seeds are there.
The kindest way I can summarize all the things wrong with the book is to say I felt like the author was holding back.
TAKE THE LEAP MAN!
That being said, this book made me furious. I threw it across the room after I finished and screamed some things my mom would still wash my mouth out if she heard. Why? Because it could have been a great book. The seeds are there.
The kindest way I can summarize all the things wrong with the book is to say I felt like the author was holding back.
TAKE THE LEAP MAN!
November 6, 2007
I guess I wanted more from this book. The idea intrigued me. It follows the trail of a bestiary that has been lost, which detailed the animals that were not on board the ark when the flood came. There are some elements of fantasy here, but not really. Personally, I wanted this to go into the realm of fantasy, see what really happened to these mythological animals, but that never happens. Instead, it is one man's pursuit of an idea and how that sustains him through his life. The novel can be summarized as a simple quest story.
December 3, 2007
Nicholas Christopher's tragic flaw is his ineptness with plot structure. He has these intriguing concepts, unique characters, and intricately rendered settings, but he blows it all when it comes to tying everything together into a well developed story. Some pieces of the novel don't tie in at all, and he skips over central plot developments in a couple of lines. I give it three stars because, barring this one mistake, his works are imaginative and profound. I'll probably pick up another one in the hopes that eventually, he'll get it right.
January 16, 2008
What an interesting book. I picked it up thinking it would be another book along the lines of The Shadow of the Wind, where people are in search of a lost codex and run into a shadowy underground ... you know, a "literary" thriller.
What this is, instead, is a more realistic depiction of what it must be like to actually do the research to find a lost tome. And although that might sound boring, it was actually a really good read.
In the end, it's the story of a man's search for meaning in his own life, and while it wasn't what I was expecting, it was a pleasant surprise.
What this is, instead, is a more realistic depiction of what it must be like to actually do the research to find a lost tome. And although that might sound boring, it was actually a really good read.
In the end, it's the story of a man's search for meaning in his own life, and while it wasn't what I was expecting, it was a pleasant surprise.
June 15, 2009
Where to begin? Kevin's review made me really want to read this book, a lot, so maybe I was set up for disappointment, but still, what a disappointment.
Firstly, it is pedantic to accent English/Anglicized words so that the readers all think the emphasis on the same syllable. Was it so important that the pegasus or whatever be "wing-ed" instead of "winged"? How crucial was it that readers not gloss over those syllables? This nonsense made me start out sort of resenting the author, all inserting himself in the book to make some irritating point, and I found it difficult to lose my awareness of the author throughout the story.
Secondly, I had trouble believing in the story of the "Caravan Bestiary" itself, because of the mixing of history and fiction. This is partly my fault for being ignorant of: the life of Lord Byron; and, the history of bestiaries from medieval times onward; but partly because the book so mixes fact with fiction that it is impossible to tell which is which without either prior knowledge of the fact or doing research on the subjects, and as far as I know this novel is not historical fiction. Why is this a problem? It is a problem for me because, again, it took me right out of the story, and made me need to know how much fact ("fact") I was reading amid all the fiction.
Of course, lots of fiction contains historical details without being historical fiction, and successfully combines the two. I suppose the problem here is that bestiaries are more arcane than, say, the US Civil War or 16th century European monarchy, making it more difficult for the uninformed reader (me) to get into the history while the story unfolded within it*. I was too aware of my ignorance to be comfortable.
Thirdly, the women are all theories of women, rather than actual, full-fledged characters. This is too common, and extremely irritating. And it's amazing how every girl Our Hero meets is so willing to go to bed with him! Except it's not amazing at all, because he is Our Hero and though flawed, ultimately A Really Wonderful Man. He comes to his dream girl's rescue twice, and she's so grateful and beautiful and has been in love with him THE WHOLE TIME he's been in love with her! What is the point of all this? It certainly does NOT advance the story of the damn Caravan Bestiary. It made me want to slap Our Hero.
Fourthly, and this is a very personal irritation, why is Bruno the vegetarian (or vegan? it's not like the author ever commits to one of those terms, which, COME ON ALREADY) extinction preservationist also a terrible jerk? It's not enough he has to have terrible health problems, he has to become bitter and nasty as well? Just because he's not Our Hero, traveling the world on some Great Mystical Mission, doesn't make him inferior. I just saw no reason for it, except maybe that the author decided he needed an unpleasant character to reflect the goodness of Our Hero back at the readers a little more strongly. Like we didn't get it a thousand times over, already.
Fifthly, the ending is abrupt, and therefore completely unsatisfying. I don't know why I even finished it at all, except it was a pretty easy read. Not especially pleasant, but definitely easy.
*Having a terrible time explaining this. How about, if you don't understand the history, you remain aware that you're outside of it, versus knowing the history, which allows you to get into the story because you don't have to think too hard about the "facts," you already know them. Right?
Firstly, it is pedantic to accent English/Anglicized words so that the readers all think the emphasis on the same syllable. Was it so important that the pegasus or whatever be "wing-ed" instead of "winged"? How crucial was it that readers not gloss over those syllables? This nonsense made me start out sort of resenting the author, all inserting himself in the book to make some irritating point, and I found it difficult to lose my awareness of the author throughout the story.
Secondly, I had trouble believing in the story of the "Caravan Bestiary" itself, because of the mixing of history and fiction. This is partly my fault for being ignorant of: the life of Lord Byron; and, the history of bestiaries from medieval times onward; but partly because the book so mixes fact with fiction that it is impossible to tell which is which without either prior knowledge of the fact or doing research on the subjects, and as far as I know this novel is not historical fiction. Why is this a problem? It is a problem for me because, again, it took me right out of the story, and made me need to know how much fact ("fact") I was reading amid all the fiction.
Of course, lots of fiction contains historical details without being historical fiction, and successfully combines the two. I suppose the problem here is that bestiaries are more arcane than, say, the US Civil War or 16th century European monarchy, making it more difficult for the uninformed reader (me) to get into the history while the story unfolded within it*. I was too aware of my ignorance to be comfortable.
Thirdly, the women are all theories of women, rather than actual, full-fledged characters. This is too common, and extremely irritating. And it's amazing how every girl Our Hero meets is so willing to go to bed with him! Except it's not amazing at all, because he is Our Hero and though flawed, ultimately A Really Wonderful Man. He comes to his dream girl's rescue twice, and she's so grateful and beautiful and has been in love with him THE WHOLE TIME he's been in love with her! What is the point of all this? It certainly does NOT advance the story of the damn Caravan Bestiary. It made me want to slap Our Hero.
Fourthly, and this is a very personal irritation, why is Bruno the vegetarian (or vegan? it's not like the author ever commits to one of those terms, which, COME ON ALREADY) extinction preservationist also a terrible jerk? It's not enough he has to have terrible health problems, he has to become bitter and nasty as well? Just because he's not Our Hero, traveling the world on some Great Mystical Mission, doesn't make him inferior. I just saw no reason for it, except maybe that the author decided he needed an unpleasant character to reflect the goodness of Our Hero back at the readers a little more strongly. Like we didn't get it a thousand times over, already.
Fifthly, the ending is abrupt, and therefore completely unsatisfying. I don't know why I even finished it at all, except it was a pretty easy read. Not especially pleasant, but definitely easy.
*Having a terrible time explaining this. How about, if you don't understand the history, you remain aware that you're outside of it, versus knowing the history, which allows you to get into the story because you don't have to think too hard about the "facts," you already know them. Right?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 16, 2011
Xeno Atlas was a neglected child, raised by his grandmother who told him about the animal spirits who haunt the world. So many animals die every day that the air is thick with them. Some people have animal spirits inside them, or were animals in another life.
Xeno has had glimpses of mysterious animals since he was a child, from the gargoyle from a city building that appeared at his window one night, to the fox present when his grandmother died. When he learns of an ancient book called the Caravan Bestiary, a book about the strange animals who were denied entrance to Noah's ark, he makes it his life's mission to find this book. His quest spans several decades, and several countries, and along the way he is confronted with the ubiquitous symbolic world of animals and animal imagery. In his search for the book, he finds himself and his place in the world.
This is exactly how I wish all actual memoirs were written. Each event mentioned is highly, if quietly, significant and echoes of it reverberate back and forth throughout the book. The child is abandoned when he is young, but there is less of a sense of sickly despair or resignation as an ownership and adaption. I understand that this is fiction, and the memoirs were real, so it is difficult to write about what you do not feel, but my GOD this book was refreshing.
Christopher treads the fine line between realism and fantasy. He has mystical, beautiful events that may or may not have happened, but he lets the reader judge. Xeno lives in the real world, but a world filled with wonder and mystery.
His quest for the Caravan Bestiary becomes incredibly academic, but still gripping, as your heart soars with each clue he discovers. I became quite jealous as he was able to devote his life to medieval academia in little flats he rented in Paris, Venice, and Greece. Seems perfect to me!
His life surrounding the quest for the Caravan Bestiary is also beautifully constructed. As his father never sees him, he creates his own family, a boy named Bruno who is a sickly biology genius hell-bent on keeping animals from extinction, and Bruno's sister, Lena, a gentle, reserved veterinarian. Occasionally, his life is shattered and he has to pick up the pieces.
The story weaves back and forth from light to dark, from heaven to hell, and the sharp contrast makes each more acutely felt. The one small thing that irked me about the book was that Christopher seemed to be foreshadowing a sinister event that never came. I wonder if anyone else had the same experience?
Xeno has had glimpses of mysterious animals since he was a child, from the gargoyle from a city building that appeared at his window one night, to the fox present when his grandmother died. When he learns of an ancient book called the Caravan Bestiary, a book about the strange animals who were denied entrance to Noah's ark, he makes it his life's mission to find this book. His quest spans several decades, and several countries, and along the way he is confronted with the ubiquitous symbolic world of animals and animal imagery. In his search for the book, he finds himself and his place in the world.
This is exactly how I wish all actual memoirs were written. Each event mentioned is highly, if quietly, significant and echoes of it reverberate back and forth throughout the book. The child is abandoned when he is young, but there is less of a sense of sickly despair or resignation as an ownership and adaption. I understand that this is fiction, and the memoirs were real, so it is difficult to write about what you do not feel, but my GOD this book was refreshing.
Christopher treads the fine line between realism and fantasy. He has mystical, beautiful events that may or may not have happened, but he lets the reader judge. Xeno lives in the real world, but a world filled with wonder and mystery.
His quest for the Caravan Bestiary becomes incredibly academic, but still gripping, as your heart soars with each clue he discovers. I became quite jealous as he was able to devote his life to medieval academia in little flats he rented in Paris, Venice, and Greece. Seems perfect to me!
His life surrounding the quest for the Caravan Bestiary is also beautifully constructed. As his father never sees him, he creates his own family, a boy named Bruno who is a sickly biology genius hell-bent on keeping animals from extinction, and Bruno's sister, Lena, a gentle, reserved veterinarian. Occasionally, his life is shattered and he has to pick up the pieces.
The story weaves back and forth from light to dark, from heaven to hell, and the sharp contrast makes each more acutely felt. The one small thing that irked me about the book was that Christopher seemed to be foreshadowing a sinister event that never came. I wonder if anyone else had the same experience?
December 20, 2024
???
When I first started this I thought it was fantasy. It is not. It’s closer to adventure or historical fiction (set in 1975) with some magical realism.
Christopher writes dialogue like he’s never spoken to an actual person and thinks people talk like how Tolkien describes trees.
I felt there were so many unnecessary distractions in the book. I nearly put it down at the beginning when suddenly Xeno was a soldier in Vietnam. The pacing was all over the place. Suddenly Xeno was jumping around Europe in the span of a few paragraphs but other times paragraphs would go on talking about how his research led him from person to person.
The research in this book was both interesting and boring. Interesting in the sense that I was never sure if the historical figures mentioned were real (which would have required a ridiculous amount of research on Christopher’s part) and also boring because I didn’t want to read about other historians—this is Xeno’s story.
Xeno’s whole life seems kind of untethered, and even Evgenia his nanny says so when they meet when he’s 26. Actually this feeling affected how I read the book too. Because he was so untethered and the chronicling of his journey was so unevenly paced I became untethered to the novel as well.
The ending??? I felt the mural was a big break. Even if he didn’t have a direct clue, it was an enormous anthropological discovery. Christopher could’ve written another 100 pages about Xeno’s journey after the mural. But what? Instead the reader is left unfulfilled after trailing behind Xeno’s disheartening journey for ten years. Nearly 300 pages for the story to end while Xeno and Lena literally gallop into the sea to skinny dip? What a waste.
When I first started this I thought it was fantasy. It is not. It’s closer to adventure or historical fiction (set in 1975) with some magical realism.
Christopher writes dialogue like he’s never spoken to an actual person and thinks people talk like how Tolkien describes trees.
I felt there were so many unnecessary distractions in the book. I nearly put it down at the beginning when suddenly Xeno was a soldier in Vietnam. The pacing was all over the place. Suddenly Xeno was jumping around Europe in the span of a few paragraphs but other times paragraphs would go on talking about how his research led him from person to person.
The research in this book was both interesting and boring. Interesting in the sense that I was never sure if the historical figures mentioned were real (which would have required a ridiculous amount of research on Christopher’s part) and also boring because I didn’t want to read about other historians—this is Xeno’s story.
Xeno’s whole life seems kind of untethered, and even Evgenia his nanny says so when they meet when he’s 26. Actually this feeling affected how I read the book too. Because he was so untethered and the chronicling of his journey was so unevenly paced I became untethered to the novel as well.
The ending??? I felt the mural was a big break. Even if he didn’t have a direct clue, it was an enormous anthropological discovery. Christopher could’ve written another 100 pages about Xeno’s journey after the mural. But what? Instead the reader is left unfulfilled after trailing behind Xeno’s disheartening journey for ten years. Nearly 300 pages for the story to end while Xeno and Lena literally gallop into the sea to skinny dip? What a waste.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 12, 2009
Book #62 of 2009
I found this book while browing a bookstore in Traverse City for another of Christopher's A Trip To The Stars. They didn't have the other book, but they did have this one.
It was an enjoyable book, a kinda of literary quest book. Not a lot of action, but interesting with reality interspersed with the fantastical. The narrator, Xeno Atlas, undertakes a quest to find the "Caravan Bestiary", a book written in the middle ages detailing all of the creatures denied entrance to Noah's flood.
I really liked some of the transitions between sections, moving the story along in space and time. For example, one section would end with Xeno walking through the woods and another would begin with Xeno exiting a different set of woods in a different place and time. The first time this happened, I got momentarily lost, but once I realize what had happened, I thought it was cool.
It was also interesting to see some of the creatures from Harry Potter being detailed here as well including the Hippogrith, the Phoenix and the Mandrake, many of which I didn't know "existed" as it were, outside of Potter's magical world.
I found this book while browing a bookstore in Traverse City for another of Christopher's A Trip To The Stars. They didn't have the other book, but they did have this one.
It was an enjoyable book, a kinda of literary quest book. Not a lot of action, but interesting with reality interspersed with the fantastical. The narrator, Xeno Atlas, undertakes a quest to find the "Caravan Bestiary", a book written in the middle ages detailing all of the creatures denied entrance to Noah's flood.
I really liked some of the transitions between sections, moving the story along in space and time. For example, one section would end with Xeno walking through the woods and another would begin with Xeno exiting a different set of woods in a different place and time. The first time this happened, I got momentarily lost, but once I realize what had happened, I thought it was cool.
It was also interesting to see some of the creatures from Harry Potter being detailed here as well including the Hippogrith, the Phoenix and the Mandrake, many of which I didn't know "existed" as it were, outside of Potter's magical world.
Read
February 5, 2009The Bestiary, Nicholas Christopher's fifth novel-after Franklin Flyer (2002) and A Trip to the Stars (2000)-has more than a little in common with Dan Brown's hugely popular The Da Vinci Code: the plots of both books are driven by a search for a lost object whose disappearance involves significant religious and historical intrigue. But The Bestiary is no mere Da Vinci knockoff. As the Washington Post opines, by blurring the edges of fantasy and reality, "Christopher is doing something strange here-and tantalizing." The novel's exploration of magical realism is what sets it apart, and its depiction of Xeno's enchanting, melancholy journey from Paris to Venice to Vietnam as he discovers beasts and himself is both riveting and heartwarming.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
December 7, 2009
I was entranced by the beginning and disappointed by the end. I thought that the descriptions of Xeno's lonely boyhood resonated emotionally and his friendship with the Moretti family was soul satisfying to read about. I think the book began to crash when Xeno began the literal search for the Bestiary. At that point, the book seemed to lose it's emotional bearings and become a kind of intellectual's "DaVinci Code" hunt. Another reviewer mentioned the book's many over-described cameo characters who appeared and disappeared for no apparent reason. I kept wondering why, for example, Christopher bothered to tell us that Sylvie, the girl who helped him in Paris, had moved to Brussels (?) with her boyfriend Charles; why bother giving this non-entity a name! Sylvie could have gone to Brussels herself & not made me wonder what the author was trying to do. I gave the book 3 stars because it has many good aspects, but it never fulfilled it's promise.
August 28, 2007
Fans of books about books should give Nicholas Christopher's new novel, The Bestiary a try. The book here is an ancient illustrated book called The Caravan Bestiary that describes all the animals that were left off of Noah's ark at the time of the flood. From a young age Xeno Atlas seeks this book, and the journeys he takes in the searching are the meat of the book. Vividly described locales include Venice, Paris, Gibralter, Vietnam, and the Greek Isles. What I like about Christopher's books is that they all have a dreamy, magical quality. They are full of strange coincidences and single-minded quests. This one doesn't quite compare to his best book
A Trip to the Stars
, but is still worth reading.
January 30, 2017
Less "magical" and more "realism" than other books by Nicholas Christopher I have read. I did miss that dreamy, floaty state I experienced reading Veronica. But still, I found the story quite absorbing. It's a relatively quick, straightforward read. The life story of the hero, Xeno, is not complex or surprising, but it has enough going on to carry you along as you gather up the true rewards of the story. Those are the arcane tidbits of ancient history, mythology of the entire Mediterranean region, imaginary (?) animals, and the lonesome life of scholarly research.
Now if someone would just publish a full color, illustrated edition of this. I would be first in line to buy it. As with all of his books, Christopher has sent me away wanting to know more. Off to Google to research bestiaries .... And if i can buy anything interesting....
Now if someone would just publish a full color, illustrated edition of this. I would be first in line to buy it. As with all of his books, Christopher has sent me away wanting to know more. Off to Google to research bestiaries .... And if i can buy anything interesting....
December 13, 2021
I loved this almost as much as I hoped. It's SO close to being a five-star book for me.
+ Mystical animals, enough said
+ Bits of magical realism with the animals playing roles in Xeno's life, subtle but powerful
+ Supporting cast of characters are all interesting, fully developed, and impactful to the story
+ Xeno travels all over the world but it's always plot-driven, never superfluous
+ The slow burn!
+ Hits on a lot of big life themes
+ The historical setting is not the main star, but woven in seamlessly (the war, the research methods)
+/- I wanted this to be slightly more about the bestiary instead of a man's (interesting) life story
+/- The ending was both good and bad; it's appropriately magical and fits the story, but I wanted to know what happened after the last scene
+ Mystical animals, enough said
+ Bits of magical realism with the animals playing roles in Xeno's life, subtle but powerful
+ Supporting cast of characters are all interesting, fully developed, and impactful to the story
+ Xeno travels all over the world but it's always plot-driven, never superfluous
+ The slow burn!
+ Hits on a lot of big life themes
+ The historical setting is not the main star, but woven in seamlessly (the war, the research methods)
+/- I wanted this to be slightly more about the bestiary instead of a man's (interesting) life story
+/- The ending was both good and bad; it's appropriately magical and fits the story, but I wanted to know what happened after the last scene
July 18, 2021
Una historia maravillosa de principio a fin. Un recorrido de la vida de Xeno, el protagonista, obsesionado por los bestiarios existentes que la Historia ha podido atestiguar, gracias a las historias que su abuela le contaba cuando era pequeño.
Así, Xeno se embarca en todo un viaje que le hará madurar tanto física como mentalmente, en busca del legendario Bestiario Caravana, donde se recogen los animales que no entraron en el Arca de Noé.
Es un libro que todo el mundo debería leer al menos una vez en su vida.
Así, Xeno se embarca en todo un viaje que le hará madurar tanto física como mentalmente, en busca del legendario Bestiario Caravana, donde se recogen los animales que no entraron en el Arca de Noé.
Es un libro que todo el mundo debería leer al menos una vez en su vida.
June 16, 2017
It started strong. The story was intriguing. However, midway through the novel, I began to loose interest. Though, I once more began to enjoy the story towards the very end. Ironically, the weakest parts of this story for me were those which involved the Caravan Bestiary. I found myself bored. Also, too many questions go unanswered. I feel like there was no real resolution for any aspect of the plot. The text just kind of ended, leaving so much open ended.
March 14, 2020
Aki szereti a lassan csordogáló történeteket, amiben nem igazán a csattanón, tetőponton, izgalmakon van a hangsúly az biztosan élvezni fogja ezt a könyvet is. Szépen megírt „élettörténete” ez Xenonak, akivel bejárjuk a világot egy könyv felkutatásának folyamatában. Bizonyos szempontból szép lezárása lett a történetnek -úgy gondolom a festmény méltó befejezése lehet a kutatásnak-, bizonyos szempontból azonban kissé összecsapottnak érzem.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2022
The beautiful prose drew me in, and the richly drawn characters beckoned me to follow. The story flowed easily with its various imagery and fantastical elements, but I found myself bogged down in the library passages. Other readers who are more used to this genre of “academic mystery” would probably be delighted to pore over the historical records and follow the timelines and figures that Xeno uncovers. I did find myself saying “That’s it?” once it was over.
November 6, 2022
Like most of my historical/contemporary fic reads lately, I picked this up at a secondhand store because I liked the topic. ;) It reads very much like a memoir, which isn't usually my cup of tea, but the story moves along fairly quickly. Any beasts involved are more metaphorical than otherwise, but that's to be expected. There definitely were a lot of exotic locales involved, and it makes for interesting vacation reading!
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