A fictional account of the true story of a herd of wild giraffes imported to Communist Czechoslovakia in 1973. The herd developed a disease dangerous to livestock and had to be destroyed.The novel starts wonderfully with the birth of Snehurka the giraffe told from her point of view. It continues strongly while the herd is being transported to Czechoslovakia but once the herd reaches Czechoslovakia and the point of view turns to various citizens of Communist Czechoslovakia who are suffering from the bleakness of Communist life the novel itself turns bleak and depressing. One character( Amina ) feels "awakened" by the giraffes but it's not enough to awaken the novel. The ending is brutal. The giraffes are shot one by one by a sharpshooter in a bloody brutal manner, that's hard to read. But then the author compounds this by telling the tale of this murder over and over again from each characters point of view. Talk about Overkill. ( )

What a curious and beautiful book, full of haunting images--ones of beauty and horror. I will think about this book often, and put it on my to-reread shelf right away. ( )

I stumbled on this book by accident. It was on a table at our local library sale, and the title caught my eye, so I picked it up. That cover! Astonishing! I had no idea what I was in for.

Whenever I describe the topic of this book to others, I am immediately treated with responses of rebuke or disgust. "I'm not reading that! That's awful!" But I encourage you to look beyond the ghastliness of the subject matter. I don't want you to miss out on the experience of the beauty of this book. I am completely ambivalent. I almost wish I had not read it so that I could have remained unaware of this brutality, and yet, I feel like everyone should read it.

Giraffe is a fictionalized, almost journalistic, account of an incident in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia. The largest herd of giraffes ever held in captivity was intentionally slaughtered, though the political reasons are dubious and inconclusive. The author presents the story through the eyes of the different unwilling participants in this drama: a scientist, a female factory worker drawn to the beauty of the giraffes, even the leader of the giraffes, called Snehuka, "Snow White," for the whiteness of her unspotted belly.

This book is beautiful and horrifying, honest and without sentimentality. The writing is superb. If you can brave the subject matter, you will feel honored for having borne witness to the story. ( )

In May 1975 the largest herd of captive giraffes (about 49 giraffes, including 23 who were pregnant) were massacred in a small Czech town, apparently senselessly. The author, a British journalist, discovered the fact of the massacre, and chose to write this book, a novel, to explain the event, rather than a more appropriate in my view nonfiction account.

This book tells the story of the giraffes from their capture in Africa, their ocean voyage to Europe, their travels to the small Czech zoo via riverboat and train, their lives in the zoo through to their final gruesome deaths. Ledgard uses several different narrators, including a couple of sections narrated by one of the giraffes. Also narrating individual sections of the novel are Emil, a haemodynamicist (a biologist studying vertical blood flow), Amina, a factory worker who visits the zoo and loves giraffes, Tadeus, a virologist, and Jiri a sharpshooter.

What was jarring to me in this book was that the author used the horrifying story of the giraffe massacre to present a morality tale of the evils of communism. I was constantly removed from the story of the giraffes on the many occasions when Ledgard used one or another of his characters to comment on the failures or evils of communism. I found this particularly bothersome since the author is not Czech, or otherwise a victim of a communist regime, so it made the book feel even more like a polemic.

Of course the entire book did not sound like a polemic. For the most part it is written rather dreamily in poetic language. (In fact one of the main narrators, Amina, is a sleepwalker, clearly intended as a metaphor for the plight of most people under communism). And there is no question that the slaughter of the giraffes is described graphically and in gruesome detail. Faint-hearted animal lovers should avoid this section of the book at all costs.

I'm glad I read the book, and I think the story of the giraffes is an important one. I just wish the book had been presented as non-fiction, or at the least that the author had not attempted to use the book as an anti-Communist propaganda tool. (POSSIBLE SPOILER--For the record, it's clear that the giraffes would have been killed regardless of the political regime under which they resided--they were suffering foot and mouth disease.)

Cautiously recommended.

2 1/2 stars ( )

Hard to say much of anything about this novel. Perhaps I should mention the great amount of blood, the violence done to innocent animals, the lives spent as a pathetic worker in a communist country. Orders given and initiated. The only comparison to Sebald I might make is the denial present in the people responsible for carrying out their orders and those subjected to these harsh realities. Part of the European condition that Sebald so adroitly and mechanically insists upon on nearly every page. But this book in no way measures up to Sebaldian prose. I am not sure why it was even written. Gratuitous massacres do not impress on me anything but disgust for those who must. And the endgame for me results in a further reckoning that the fiction behind it all is best served as only a skilled Cormac can. ( )