FICTION

THE GIRAFFE by Marie Nimier, translated from the French by Mary Feeney. (Four Walls Eight Windows: $18; 199 pp.) “Paradoxical as it may seem,’ says the twisted boy/man who narrates this novel, “I never liked animals--to this day I dislike them. There is something in their way of resembling us that I can’t stand.” This is our first tip-off, and luckily it comes early on, when Joseph applies for a job at the Vincennes Zoo, that we are in the hands of a cruel, isolated but not altogether unlikable protagonist. Certainly there is no shortage of good reasons for his tortured relationship to relationships: Mother died after birth, father remains a drunken half-person, child is sent to live on a farm where he works for weeks at driving his foster parent’s dog insane. In the process he learns the kind of cunning from the frightened animal that gets the pathologically deprived through life. This is writing in which the straightforward, almost funny tone seals in the really horrible pain and loneliness of the characters, leaving the reader with an expression on his face not unlike a grimace--somewhere between humor and horror.

Joseph is given sole responsibility for a young giraffe sent to France as a gift from the Pretoria government. The story of his guardianship and love for Solange is interwoven with memories and sexual fantasies, with zookeepers, cashiers, nursing women on buses, strangers in crowded subways and children watching animals in captivity copulating. As Chauncey Gardiner said so benignly in “Being There”: “I like to watch.” Joseph likes to watch, but each fantasy is locked in a death-grip with childhood deprivation, and each fantasy is mistaken for relationship. One of the pieces involves a painting that Joseph steals, a painting that relates the journey of a giraffe, “the Pasha of Egypt’s gift to King Charles X, crossing France on foot early in the last century.” The keeper, Yussef, resembles our hero in aspect and devotion, and the possibility that fate has confused these two lives offers some salvation for Joseph in his pathetic present life. “I will be your Joseph, son of Yussef, faithful and devoted guardian of our destiny. A long moonless night, far from the hue and cry, freed from the certainty of words.”