Customer Reviews

Pork

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pork and Others is one of my favorite books. The language is spare and crisp, the structure of each story is logical and well-constructed, but even so, they take you by surprise. Freddi proves himself a masterful writer, but best of all, a gifted story-teller, clear of sentimentality, who places you in the forest, seeing the world from a vole's-eye view. Freddi's world may not be a pretty place, but it is challenging and invigorating. Bambi-lovers will hate it, intelligent and sophisticated readers will cherish it. I hope he writes more.

I appreciated this author's approach to anthropomorphization. The animals in his stories talk, think, and experience human emotion, but they are still quite bestial. The lives of many forest animals are uncertain, violent, and fraught with danger, and no animal is guaranteed a long life. In "Pork," characters I came to like sometimes died suddenly and randomly, or turned out to be rather vicious creatures. I also appreciated how well the author matched personalities with different kinds of animals. Each kind of animal - stoat, squirrel, mouse, etc. - had its own uniquely flavored personality. Nice stuff.

Further, I liked the author's prose. His language is crisp, his descriptive phrases are wonderful, and he has an ear for dialogue.

Still, these stories didn't really grab my interest. The stories were simple, and there was no real meat to them. There was nothing bigger in them than the small fables, adventures, and tribulations of forest animals.

I can imagine someone disagreeing, and saying, "The animals are quite human, and the book's audience can relate to them in a meaningful way!" I agree to an extent; the audience can relate to the animals. But the tone and style of the stories, which are often like fables or storybooks, prevent the characters from seeming real, and make them lack the depth and meaning of real people and emotion.

I don't recommend reading this if you really want to sink your teeth in to a book. Further, I don't recommend this if you're looking to be swept away, to be dragged and held down in a fictional world. While interesting in its own way, this book is not very compelling.

While not a children's book, this was one of my favourites growing up. It contains 11 excerpts from the lives of some of Britain's wildlife. A mixture of fantasy and genuine animal behavior, this book follows in the footsteps of Watership Down or Dunston Wood. As in the real world, the creature's lives are often all too grim and brief. In spite of this, there is an undercurrent of hope, of triumph, and of the unending quest for something more than mundane life. My only complaint was that so few illustrations were included. The delicate drawings perfectly captured the animals he wrote about.

Pork is a collection of short stories about animals living in the forest. It is an in depth look at nature and how it could be perceived if the animals had personalities. The stories can be quite chilling and disturbing. Sometimes, the meaning of each story is not clear, but you will find it if you look hard enough.

This is quite an interesting book of short stories. It warns that some of the stories are violent - and this is kind of the case. The first stories really have no point to them. But I found as the book went on, the stories got better.

But as for these animals talking and having personalities - I found it quite hard to sink in. Nonetheless - it was well worth a read if there is nothing better to do on a rainy day. The other advantage of books like these is that the stories are short and only take a maximum of 30 minutes to read (depending on speed).