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Remembering a Renaissance Elephant and His Mahout

Remembering a Renaissance Elephant and His Mahout José Saramago, The Elephant’s Journey (Margaret Jull Costa, Trans.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 205 pp. What do you do when confronted with a weird bit of animal history? Say you asked about a strange piece of restaurant decor, only to learn that it represented an event that, centuries ago, took an Indian elephant on an extraordinary journey across Europe? Nobel prize-winning writer José Saramago explains that it was through just such a “chance encounter” that he came to learn of a pachyderm used as potlatch for monarchs, who thereby came to be sent on a successful voyage over sea and Alps from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551. With humor, pathos, and all the other imaginative strengths for which Saramago became a renowned novelist, he fictionalizes this true story in his penultimate novel, The Elephant’s Journey . Part of what makes it funny is that the novel is not told from Solomon the elephant’s perspective, but rather relayed through a 21st-century narrator who underscores the novelist’s difficulties in covering vast distances of space and time. In pointed contrast to bestsellers like Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (2000), where an omniscient narrator provides a view into elephants’ minds http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Society & Animals Brill

Remembering a Renaissance Elephant and His Mahout

McHugh, Susan
Society & Animals , Volume 20 (3): 314 – Jan 1, 2012
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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Review Section
ISSN
1063-1119
eISSN
1568-5306
DOI
10.1163/15685306-12341240
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

José Saramago, The Elephant’s Journey (Margaret Jull Costa, Trans.). New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 205 pp. What do you do when confronted with a weird bit of animal history? Say you asked about a strange piece of restaurant decor, only to learn that it represented an event that, centuries ago, took an Indian elephant on an extraordinary journey across Europe? Nobel prize-winning writer José Saramago explains that it was through just such a “chance encounter” that he came to learn of a pachyderm used as potlatch for monarchs, who thereby came to be sent on a successful voyage over sea and Alps from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551. With humor, pathos, and all the other imaginative strengths for which Saramago became a renowned novelist, he fictionalizes this true story in his penultimate novel, The Elephant’s Journey . Part of what makes it funny is that the novel is not told from Solomon the elephant’s perspective, but rather relayed through a 21st-century narrator who underscores the novelist’s difficulties in covering vast distances of space and time. In pointed contrast to bestsellers like Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (2000), where an omniscient narrator provides a view into elephants’ minds

Journal

Society & Animals – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2012

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