14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Animal Farm meets The Stranger, March 17, 2010
This review is from: Ętre the Cow (Hardcover)
Parable. Sattire. Existential manifesto. Etre, is a lot of things.
As the book's opening pages tell us, "This is a story about a cow. Or not." The main character, a bull named Etre pastured at Gorwell Farm, is somehow self-aware, "alone in his awareness", and utterly humiliated by the nature of his lowly existence, by his "stinking cowness." And all of this before he realizes the fate of the average cow is destined to be his too.
At the risk of sounding dramatic, I might offer that--as the title suggest--Etre is about everything it means "to be." What DOES it mean?
We all start out as Etres, innocent and curious. And this little book is about the big thing that makes us turn: knowingness; coming to the awareness of what it means to be alive. Too often it means failure, insecurity, and impotence. But then there is beauty. In a child's soft singing. In the way a tiny firefly defies the boundless dark. Beauty even in the blameless brutality of nature, with its own system of economics where "cows feed on the grass and uproot the worms [which] the egrets feed on..."
This existence, between the greener grasses Etre longs for and the slaughterhouse he wants to escape, is OUR existence, and it's what makes "Etre the Cow" hard to define or fence in.
What is not in question is the beauty of the writing, elegant in its simplicity. Think the themes of Keats, Whitman, Camus, written in the prose of Hemingway. I know, I know--it's "a book about a cow." But Kenniff makes Etre real and his struggle meaningful, not so much in spite of the cowtagonist, as because of him.
In the same way that humor makes talking about difficult things a bit more palatable, seeing the world through the eyes of a cow allows the reader to see life as it is, without judgment or sentimentality--at times harsh, at times lovely, always sublime.
Does Etre escape the cow pasture? His destiny? Can any of us? Don't be fooled by Etre's humble voice or the book's modest size. Both are asking bold and worthy questions.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ruminations on a cow's life, June 2, 2010
This review is from: Ętre the Cow (Hardcover)
Etre the Cow is a book that makes you ruminate. At first chew, it is a simple tale of a bull in a pasture, doing bullish things and leading a bullish life. One the second chew, the tale's impact becomes deeper, and really makes you think about life, not just for a bull in a pasture, but for humans in our own urban or rural pastures, going about our daily lives. This is a short book, and a relatively quick read, but like other parables (such as Pilgrim's Progress or Animal Farm) the narrative's meaning speaks of issues that are (for lack of a better descriptor) universally human. This is not a simple bucolic tale of a bull wandering around eating grass. It is a deep, dark look into what it means to be at once sentient and propelled by forces beyond one's control. It is at once touching, dramatic, disturbing and even hopeful. This book belongs on the shelf of any thinking person with a heart that sometimes yearns for more.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A look in the mirror, perhaps?, May 11, 2010
This review is from: Ętre the Cow (Hardcover)
"The more we know, the greater our woe." It is what many of us have probably thought to ourselves at one time, or another. Our constant worries, our projections into the future, our 'what if's'...our very real awareness of mortality, can cause us great distress. Meet Etre, a bull cow who has, through some strange quirk, developed an awareness that goes well beyond instinct and rote learning.
Etre, sadly, lives in shame of his very existence, for he is not like the humans he sees every day...he is only a lowly bull. Will Etre always maintain this shame, and will he always keep his deep envy for humankind? Will Etre 'think' his way out of a brutal and horrific demise? This is a marvelous novella that in so many ways parallels the human condition, and questions if we humans are all as superior as we would believe, and whether it is true that "Ignorance is bliss."
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