Girafe

by Marie Nimier

With a precise, almost clinical eye, Nimier lays the fantastic groundwork of this story: Joseph, a young man, himself an outsider to mainstream French society because of his African ancestry, gets a job in the zoo. There he is made caretaker of the zoo's giraffe, Solange. Solange both literally and metaphorically rises above the clumsy, grasping humans who are her captors, and Nimier makes plausible Joseph's tragi-comic love - both sexual and spiritual - for the creature. Joseph develops an elaborate system of punishments and rewards and conducts them with great delicacy, devotion and cruelty. Solange responds with tremulous sighs, the batting of eyelashes, sidelong glances - each as subtle and as full of meaning as a lover's. But while Joseph's love for Solange grows, his relationship with the rest of the world disintegrates...