I expect that 'The Grass Library' will divide readers in their opinion of its merits. Jeffrey Masson, author of ('When Elephants Weep') calls it a 'philosophical and poetic journey' and avers that reading it will in 'some profound sense' alter your life. It didn't do it for me. A couple of the animal anecdotes were mildly entertaining and the discussion of the 'Flehman Response', familiar to anyone who has grown up on a farm with ruminants, had a promising beginning before tailing off into whimsicality. But all too often it seemed to this reader that Brooks was asking implicitly for indulgence in sentimental mawkishness. His speculation that his dog Charlie began to censor the books he might read, hiding those that failed to condemn human carnivores and hunters ('Kicking Rilke'), was a whimsy too far for me. David Brooks has written other books, wonderful in their variety - 'The House of Balthus' and 'Sons of Clovis' - are memorably perceptive and engaging. This exercise in sentimental anthropomorphism fell well short of Jeffrey Masson's encomium. ( )

The Grass Library is a gorgeous book. Anyone who loves animals will be enchanted... but it's a book that will challenge your thinking as well.

David Brooks is the author of some books I've really liked. He's a very versatile writer, publishing poetry, short fiction, essays, non-fiction and novels, two of which I've read and reviewed here: The Umbrella Club (2009) and The Conversation (2012), and before that, The Fern Tattoo (2007). But The Grass Library despite its fanciful name, is a work of non-fiction, quite unlike anything I've ever read before. This is the blurb:

A philosophical and poetic journey recounting the author's relationship with his four sheep and other animals in his home in the Blue Mountains. Both memoir and eloquent testament to animal rights.

But that doesn't really convey the fun and delight in reading this book.

It had never occurred to me that even a word-processor can be 'speciesist'. Mulling over whether it was an appropriate use of the word 'tragedy' to describe the fate of a cicada trapped to die in its own shell, Brooks considers the Shakespearean sense of tragedy and how we tend to reserve it not only for humans at the top of a human hierarchy—kings, Caesars, generals— [or a beautiful young princess whose power lay in her celebrity status] but we also apply it in the non-human realm for larger, more powerful creatures, such as lions, elephants, and whales. But the fate of a cicada halfway through its metamorphosis seems to Brooks to be tragic too:

Why then did I have such conversations with myself about the term? But the cultural discourse is speciesist, the very language is speciesist (the Word program, for example, at just this moment, tells me that the word 'speciesist' doesn't exist: no point in asking it about anti-speciesism, then, or counter-speciesism, trans-speciesism), in ways that contain and constrain one just as a cicada's shell must contain the larva—except that they, cicadas, seem to have found a way to get out, even if not every one of them succeeds. (p.128)

[Mind you, I've heard people talk about sporting defeats as tragedies too, so I think perhaps that 'tragedy' is a word that lends itself to pondering about a sense of proportion].

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/06/21/the-grass-library-by-david-brooks/ ( )