Giraffe

From the back cover:

In 1975 secret police dressed in chemical warfare suits sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and orchestrated the slaying of forty-nine giraffe, the largest captive herd in the world.

Such is the premise for J.M. Ledgard's outstanding first novel, Giraffe. I am completely enamored of the novel, and may have only one quibble -- which is that while exposing the inhumanity and illogic of totalitarian (or, specifically, Communist) regimes has not slipped fully into irrelevance, it also lacks the immediacy that it once had. Beyond that, the novel is a gem: dreamlike in its prose, alternating passages charged with lyrical, political, and personal reflection, quiet desire, and electricity. The elements that I love best about prose writing and novels find a confluence in Giraffe: an elegant and understated style, a narrative that bends and blurs the edges of reality, without ever forcing us into the territory of the incredulous, an intense, indirect engagement with deep questions, and grounding it all, tethers to science, politics, and those utterly human things that drive the world, and provide the framework for those things that drive our hearts forward. Baroque praise, I'm sure, but well-earned. Giraffe is easily one of my favorite novels of the past few years.