• Animals
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Archipelago Books

Animals

Animals

by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll

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Available as E-Book Spanish Literature
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Hebe Uhart’s Animals tells of piglets that snack on crackers, parrots that rehearse their words at night, southern screamers that lurk at the front door of a decrepit aunt’s house, and, of course, human animals, whose presence is treated with the same inquisitive sharpness and sweetness that marks all of Uhart’s work. Animals is a joyous reordering of attention towards the beings with whom we share the planet. In prose that tracks the goings on of creatures who care little what we do or say, a refreshing humility emerges, and with it a newfound pleasure in the everyday. Watching a whistling heron, Uhart writes, “that rebellious crest gives it a lunatic air.” Birds in the park and dogs in the street will hold a different interest after reading Uhart’s blissful foray into playful zoology.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810922
Pages: 200
Publication Date:

Praise

Uhart, who died in 2018, was an utter master of the gentle observation. Her work combines unsentimental affection with endless curiosity about the details of everyday life . . . Animals is at once tender, bemused, informative, and deeply fun . . . It asks, through sweet, respectful attention, how we might best relate to animals; how we humans, so accustomed to seeing ourselves as nature's rulers, might adjust our attitudes.
—Lily Meyer, NPR

Reading Hebe Uhart we laugh a lot, although we are never sure if what we’ve read is just a joke, because in her words there is also, above all, precision and wisdom . . . Hebe Uhart’s books are full of these small revelations, which are born of a religious attention to detail and an ear that clearly perceives the ups and downs of language.
—Alejandro Zambra

Hebe approached her subjects from an astonished and oblique angle that, at first, might appear naive. Not so. Her short stories feature protagonists rarely seen in Argentine literature...Always rescuing the voices that no one pays attention to, yet not at all in a pompous way, for, if there was one thing that Hebe Uhart never wanted to do, it was to fall into the common position of giving voice to the voiceless and other slogans that she would consider idiotic.
—Mariana Enriquez (translated by Robert Croll), Página/12

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