Okay, picture a nonspecific animal that is part insect, part bird, part lizard, part pachydern, and you have the Palafox. The book by Eric Chevillard is something of a bagatelle, and probably not for animal lovers. The first half of Palafox is mostly taken up by a chase when the beast gets loose. In the second half, the creature's human caregivers try to figure out what to do with it: put it in the circus, cook it, kill it ... whatever. It's rather difficult to sympathize with the Palafox, because we have such a difficult time imagining what it looks like:We approach, he recoils, frightening, he beats his chest with his enormous fists, as if he were trying to hammer out armor in a hurry. We draw back. Palafox takes advantage of our hesitation, and wriggling around he attempts to slip through the netting -- he has already managed to get his head and one of his paws through, three, seven, then twelve of his paws, but already we are on him. Franc-Nohain winds rope around his ankles. Swanscombe muzzles him and Algernon, Algernon chloroforms him. Two fat balls of cork borrowed from Sadarnac take the treachery out of those horns. Let us be sure we make him exhaust his venom: be careful not to make him spit his poison. Then Algernon slips him gingerly into a crystal-clear paper pouch and gives free reign [rein?] to his joy.Thus, the shaggy Palafox story. In the end, the Palafox is innocent, but we humans look awfully cold-hearted.
Chevillard makes the impossible happen every second sentence. With dazzling wit and a staggering sense of the grotesque Palafox narrates, belabours, teases, and tricks along the story of a protean creature and the family who attempts to find, take care of, profit from, and finally kill, it. Its name is Palafox, but that seems the only sure thing about it. Perhaps most strikingly, however, is the sense that none of what goes on is in the least way surreal, banal, or dreamlike: everything is presented with the same levelled tone (which could never, however, be mistaken for the voice of some tepid realist prose fiction, however). It's been a while since I read a book with such a strongly intertwined sense of the dark and the delightful. Oh, and Archipelago Books have made this a beauty of a book, which is a nice touch on their part. Fine paper, dry, matte covers, a restrained colour scheme. It gives a sombre touch to the book that compliments, I feel, the written voice.Perhaps this could stand as a new, unprepossesing, writers' manifesto:you will forgive us the tangents that punctuate this story, or make it unravel, since we always manage to make our way back to the point.Parenthetically: Goodreads, you've got a crazy way of complimenting people:
Do You like book Palafox (2004)?
I am putting this one on hold. Now that I’m a graduate, the university has retracted my library privileges (woe!) and this book must return to the stacks. I very much admire Chevillard’s writing style, the finesse with which he describes Palafox, an unclassifiable beast who shares distinct, previously unparagoned characteristics with many other beasts. Palafox is an escape artist, a shape shifter, a cuddle monster with a cold streak. He wends through sewers and households like a pro under the eye ("noses" also apply!) of scientists, nursemaids and others who aim to capture him. Hopefully I will seek this out again in the future . . .
—Leslie
