I was really looking forward to reading Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife. I had read favorable reviews and the book jacket blurbs were by authors whose work I respect—Dava Sobel (Longitude) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). I was intrigued by the story—a Polish couple saves the animals of the Warsaw Zoo as well as three hundred Jews during the German occupation of World War II.But, halfway through the fourth chapter, I have completely abandoned the book, with no plans on returning to it. I am glad that I checked it out from the library.
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The book appears to be meticulously researched. Ackerman has obviously done her homework. However, she tries too hard to get into the minds of the people and animals that she is portraying. In her attempts to draw the reader into the narrative, she has instead alienated this one. I think it would work well as a piece of dada writing that was intended to frustrate, but it does nothing for me as an historical work or a biography.
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The first chapter was too frenetic, too scattershot, too disjointed. Paragraphs didn't follow one another. It was as though stream-of-consciousness was used to "set the scene." The atmosphere and tone never materialized because it wasn't apparent how we were moving between images. It was as though someone was throwing Polaroid pictures in front of me but not explaining the relevance of one to the others. Instead, I was supposed to guess. And, I don't mind working to figure out what is going on in a book. I like stories that challenge. This one just didn't make sense.
Ackerman attempts to establish some of the flavor of nineteen-thirties Warsaw. She describes particular Polish foods and floral arrangements. She conveys the smells and sights and sounds of a particular open-air market. Her attempts feel forced and pretentious at times. When explaining the movements of klipspringer antelopes, which seems extraneous to begin with, she writes
Startle them and they will bounce around the enclosure and possibly leap the fence, and, like all antelopes, they pronk. Legend has it that, in 1919, a Burmese man invented the closest human equivalent to pronking—a hopping stick for his daughter, Pogo, to use crossing puddles on her way to school. [30-31]The merely extraneous becomes exponentially tangential.
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She also writes in metaphors to which I cannot relate. I read what she wrote and found it difficult to imagine the connection between her words and the images they are supposed to describe.
Example one:
Not their breathing, though, and at night the sleepy tempo of breaths and snufflings created a zoological cantata hard to score. [24]This just feels like someone trying too hard to impress, or someone trying to be overly precious. The analogy of the breathing of animals and classical music?
Example two:
The older boys believed, as Antonina did, that war belonged to the world of adults, not children. She sensed Rys yearned to grill them with questions, though he didn't want to look stupid or, worse, like a little kid, so he kept quiet about the invisible hand grenade lying at his feet that everyone feared might explode. [42]First, he is a little kid. Second, what is the invisible hand grenade? His worries about the war? The possibility he may have to give his life in conflict or service to war? Antonina being overly dramatic? Ackerman being overly dramatic on Antonina's behalf? I sense the latter.
Example three:
Just before dawn, Antonina woke to the distant sound of gravel pouring down a metal chute, which her brain soon deciphered as airplane engines. [45]I have heard gravel pouring down a metal chute and I have heard airplane engines. I don't see the similarity. I cannot "hear" the similarity.
Example four:
As they approached Zbawiciel Square, the engine noise ground louder and then planes floated overhead, appearing in the gap between the rooftops like stereopticon slides. [47]Stereopticon slides? That was when I realized that I was done. I was finished not only because of the images that were just too divorced from the way that I see the world, but also due to the fact that I still had nothing that intrigued me. No character had been developed in any way. The attempts at establishing tone or setting or narrative thread were non-existent. I had nothing to grasp. I closed the book and then closed my eyes.
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A couple of minutes later, I opened my eyes again and thought I would peek at a few pages farther along to see if things improved. I came upon a Nietzsche quote from Twilight of the Idols ("That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.") that was pulled out of context and that Ackerman tries to have me believe that Antonina related to her young son, who wasn't even present at the German aerial bombing of Zbawiciel Square, or in Warsaw, for that matter.
I was, and am, done with this book. It gets returned to the library tomorrow.
