The Atlas of Poetic Zoology - Emmanuelle Pouydebat (trans. Erik Butler) ***

There something of a literary version of a cabinet of curiosities about The Atlas of Poetic Zoology - it features 36 species, selected because they were outstanding to the author for a whole range of reasons, though many seem to have been chosen because they're strange-looking. Each animal gets two or three pages of text and a full page illustration, which unfortunately is painted rather than photographed, so it can be difficult to be sure how accurate the representation is - though it does make some of the illustrations rather beautiful as items in their own right.

I found it entertaining to flick through, but isn't a book I can recommend to sit down and read end to end. In large part this is down to the text. Because it's a translation, I don't know if the wording, which feels a bit like a year 9 school essay, reflects the original or the way it has been rendered into English, but the result feels a distinctly immature piece of writing.

Here's the opening of the first item, on the African Bush Elephant, to demonstrate the style: 'No animal inspires as much affection, fear and admiration in me as the biggest land mammal alive. It's hard to find a species as complex and fascinating, or as paradoxical, as the African elephant. Complex and fascinating? Indeed! The elephant displays a broad array of incredible behaviors and physical aptitudes, some of which we cannot explain at all. Paradoxical? But of course.' And there are more rhetorical questions? And exclamation marks! But of course.

I don't deny the fascination of some of these creatures, whether in the etherial beauty of the blue dragon sea slug, the remarkable imitation of a flower by the orchid mantis or the downright weirdness of the the red-lipped batfish. (The illustration is straight out of the Beatles' cartoon version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, though the painting does look even weirder than the real thing.) However, this approach didn't work for me as a way to get across the wonders of these exotic organisms.

Oh, and it's not an atlas.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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