Bestiary

Product Information

Medieval bestiaries contained detailed descriptions and illustrations of species native to Western Europe, exotic animals and what in modern times are considered to be imaginary animals. The stories popularized through the bestiary continued to influence natural history texts and images well into the sixteenth century. Mapped species included legendary people believed to live beyond the bound of Europe, which fascinated medieval audiences. Chang's facility for making even mundane or traumatic events beautiful with words is a reminder that stories are, among other things, some of our very best survival tools.

Violence is not one-dimensional in Bestiary; Chang doesn't excuse it, especially when it takes place between the family members, but she has her narrators contextualize it in their stories, reaching back through memories dressed up with myths to find the beauty that coexists with hurt and trauma. Is it because I am Chinese that I feel our culture super excels in deep, dark, morose secrets that shall remain hidden? Following the Physiologus, Saint Isidore of Seville (Book XII of the Etymologiae) and Saint Ambrose expanded the religious message with reference to passages from the Bible and the Septuagint. Throughout most of the read, I thought the gruesome imageries were the author’s attempt to make Bestiary a disturbing read.So much talk of shit, piss, ass holes, and grotesque descriptions of things that are usually described beautifully - like kissing, touching, and discovering your body. In addition, the well-known characteristics associated with numerous beasts—the unicorn, the elephant, and the fox, among others—were effortlessly appropriated for secular works made for the elite realm of the court. I wanted to bring a similar playful energy, and in the novel, I tried experimenting with form by incorporating footnotes, vignettes, and oral histories, creating a queer and matriarchal story in which the narrator doesn’t necessarily need to look to the “outside” world for what’s possible – rather, she grapples with what she’s inherited, deciding what lineages she wants to be a part of.

She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade. Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks. He then runs up to the roof of the hundred-plus-story-tall building and leaps off it, his father on his heels jumping off right after.By the end, I felt like I'd fallen in a river, trudged through the mud and muck, covered with viscera, and given birth to a new self. I very much enjoyed the moral of the story and the subjective footnotes but I think that I didn't dig deep enough, hence this book is worth a re-read. The unicorn became one of the most beloved animals in art of the period, largely due to its connection to Christ. The descriptions could be organized by animal groupings, such as terrestrial and marine creatures, or presented in an alphabetical manner.

Although the essential elements of the text and imagery associated with each creature remained largely consistent across manuscripts, the bestiary was not a standardized book.All that said, though, I enjoyed the slightly unhinged quality of the first-person storytelling very much, and I'll definitely be looking for Chang's next book. The storytelling is saturated with surrealism, so much so that the main plot arc is nearly lost in the multiple myths and magical realist fables woven in. Here are two of the beasts, then, just in the first couple of pages — Grandmother, whose violence never makes Agong's memories resurface, and Agong's skull full of snakes, snakes which awaken Agong's body to his former occupation as a soldier and make him act out his flashbacks. Donika Kelly’s Bestiary is a catalog of creatures—from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin.