The Old Men at The Zoo by Angus Wilson, author of the much more appreciated, fabulous Anglo-Saxon Attitudes http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/01/anglo-saxon-attitudes-by-angus-wilson.html - 7 out of 10

 

The Old Men at The Zoo by Angus Wilson, author of the much more appreciated, fabulous Anglo-Saxon Attitudes http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/01/anglo-saxon-attitudes-by-angus-wilson.html

7 out of 10

 

 

“The person who doesn't read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is immortality backwards’ – this is what Umberto Eco said and that is of such great help to one who does little except for reading, or having books read by others, as in audiobooks like Rabbit, Run by John Updike http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/rabbit-run-by-john-updike-may-make-you.html finished the other day -

 

We could laugh though when we arrive to the situation where we do not find the lives of some characters so fun to go through, such as these Old Men at The Zoo and then we can think of another great writer, Malcolm Bradbury and his chef d’oeuvre To The Hermitage http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/notes-on-to-hermitage-by-malcolm.html wherein he speaks of the advantage of the literary world over the physical one, the former has personages that are cleverer, more interesting, wiser, attractive, the events in there are more enticing, life is more exuberant (these are not the words of the author, but what I remember of the prose) and then we also have the advantage of getting access to these awesome characters and their beanos, from our room or bed.

The added advantage would be that in the artistic realm, we can also disengage suddenly, we are not forced to continue to participate as is the case in the ‘real’ realm – for instance, right now I have a serious crisis on my hands with the spouse, who is out there, maybe in the mountains, carrying with (my) car the family to who knows what spending shindigs and this at a time of crisis, when bills will reach extreme highs for energy, fuel and what not – and if we find The Men at The Zoo irritating, boring o just not appealing enough to stay connected with their saga, well, then we can just stop reading…

 

This is what I did, finding the term ‘Hideous kinky’, which I generally applied for wondrous, fabulous magnum opera, to be more suitable here for the first part – Hideous Kinky is a mesmerizing saga by Esther Freud, daughter of acclaimed painter (absent in the childhood of the writer, if we look into the novel) Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of the titanic Sigmund Freud http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/06/hideous-kinky-by-esther-freud-10-out-of.html - though I am exaggerating for mirthful purposes…

There are quite a few passages that we can relate to in The Old Men at The Zoo, such as the perils of a world war that are so terrifying right now, when we face the almost certain arrival of a new crisis (and my wife is out spending god knows where, she has done over many months, in spite of the debts we have, the news that show prices rising, economic activity threated, bad results from the company that provides us with dividends, when the weather if fine) and Putin and his acolytes keep speaking of Armageddon…

 

This is so serious, for they even calibrate to say that they could use tactical nuclear weapons, in other words, smaller devices, but still devastating ones, for to my knowledge, they are still more powerful that what they used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for in the meantime, they have ‘pe4fected the capabilities, to the point where the H bomb and others have incredible powers to destroy and kill humans…

Thinking about it, maybe that was one of the reasons why The Old Men at The Zoo became somewhat redundant, and it is also way too long in my view, for the winding, rather uninteresting on so many pages story of the giraffe that kills a keeper at the London Zoo, sometime in the future, which is placed around the 1970s, and the consequent look for culprits, the evasion of the manager, the effort to avoid such cases in the future, competing with the need for a good image to be preserved, so that a new National Zoological Park could be established, and the priority for the latter matter would see that the death of the new, inexperienced keeper, killed by a sick giraffe does not affect the project

 

There are details to follow there, such as the fact that the giraffe has been sick, her liver was causing pain and she should have been euthanized, but in the name of that aforementioned vital issue, the new Zoological Park, the giraffe was kept alive, so that it can serve the ‘higher cause’, and the new man had not known so well how to approach the animal and thus the giraffe had been scared presumably and then such an innocent, peaceful being normally, took fright and defended itself with violence.

The nuclear aspect, or the prospect of war is so frightening at the present that its presence in the book could work to make it more interesting for some readers – after all, The Old Men at The zoo is included on the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction - but it could deter others, such as the under signed

 

Finally, there is the aspect of the Zoo which I have had at home and reading about the Men at the Zoo did not bring back phenomenal memories…the same wife I was complaining about earlier has decided about fifteen years ago to have six…dogs, and not just any kind of pet, but borzoi, those that fit into ‘giant breed’ category, in other words, the equivalent of maybe north of one hundred Chihuahuas…

Therefore, with the financial crisis of 2008, this became such a burden that I became crazy, and hence you have notes like these – fortunately, I do know that those who stick around to reach this far into the nonsense clearly have similar, if not worse issues, so we are free to go ahead – and feeding all these beasts and well, anybody for that matter became a serious challenge, and it had to be done accumulating debt.

Indeed, it is not fair to play the IIWFY game detailed in the psychology classic Games People Play by Eric Berne http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/09/games-people-play-by-eric-berne.html a game which involves us blaming the consort for something we could not achieve, and the fact that we have two macaws is partly my choice (one was brought home by Throw Mama From The Train) and then we could all do this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world