Dovey manages to intertwine questions of humanity with animals and conflict in a way that has you empathising with both humans and animals experiencing tragedy. Each short story gives insight into elements of hypocrisy and devastation in the historical events that rocked the world. A different take on conflict than other short stories, and one that is certainly worth the read. ( )

"Telling fairy tales: two bears are the only ones left in 1992 in the Sarajevo zoo after all the other animals have starved to death. The black bear is waiting for the blind, female brown bear to die so he can eat her. A witch who risks getting shot sneaking bread in for him and his companion gives him some horrifying news as he is sucking on her thigh bone."

"I, the elephant, wrote this: I loved this story of a tribe of female elephants. The elders tell the young ones stories of their ancestors, whose souls are in the stars. Twin sisters dream of dying a heroic death so their souls will be in the stars, just as Castor and Pollux, twin brother elephants in the Paris zoo during the Paris Commune, when all the animals in the zoo were eaten by the rich."

"More: a mussel who travels from the Hudson River to Oregon and on to Hawaii, and then dies in the attack of Pearl Harbor; a tortoise who travels to space in the great space race;"

"Trippy book about different Animals that died: a camel that had to carry an upright piano roped to its back in Australia; Colette's cat who died in the trenches of WWI; a chimpanzee trained to speak, dress, act and talk like an Englishman is having a female chimpanzee groomed to be his wife, but he's in love with an englishwoman; a dog, betrayed by his jealous master, is starved and has a bomb put on his back, and, when food is put under a tank, goes to its"reward."

A letter to Sylvia PLath: a dolphin belonging to the U.S. Navy is deployed in 2003 to Iraq. Her job is to attach a golf-ball-sized tag on the breathing tubes of any divers caught near a military vessel. (paraphrased)"why do you think humans feel a strange tingling when they (cruelly participate in) swim with dolphins? It's because we dolphins scan you."
Psittacophile: this is the last story: Grrr; another story about a human who makes a commitment to take care of an animal and then dumps it. Just because Israelis started bombing Beirut is no reason to leave a parrot locked in its cage hanging from the awning of the now-deserted pet store where the human bought"Barnes." ( )

Intriguing. Short stories across a hundred year time span, each based around an animal with links to famous people, often authors. They let us inside their lives and thoughts. The cross-over into being able to speak with humans and other species at times is somewhat disconcerting. ( )

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey is a rich and wonderful collection of ten short stories told by the souls of animals who died in human conflicts around the world. Anthropomorphic animals as fodder for authors is as old as Aesop and many of the authors who appear in these stories have written from the perspective of animals, too. But there is something new and fresh in these stories.

Perhaps it is the structural framework that makes it so exciting. Each story has three elements in common, they are all told by the souls of self-aware animals who died in human conflicts and at least one great writer is part of the story one way or another. Within those limitations, Dovey demonstrates a limitless ability to imagine and to write.



They are all connected to literature, to Kafka, to Tolstoy, to Hesse. My favorite story was told by a mollusk whose pre-World War II adventures sounded like a bivalve Kerouac “On the Boat” told with hilarious gusto as he travels from the Hudson River to Pearl Harbor. “The whole goal was detachment, gathering no algae, freewheeling…we would talk all the time about how we would practice non-attachment while depending on our survival on attaching to a base with our byssus threads.” If you can read that story without laughing, you’ve never read On the Road.

Some of the stories take your heart and crush it. The story of the twin elephants who died in a civil war in Mozambique is magical, beautiful and heartbreaking. The US military-trained dolphin who writes a letter to Sylvia Plath broke my heart. Then, there’s the Zelig-like tortoise who goes from Tolstoy to Virginia Woolf to George Orwell (from whom he runs away) to the Soviet Space Program and whose placid wisdom is entrancing. There is Colette’s cat, accidentally left behind at the Front of World War who always felt she was a tom, not a she-cat or Goering’s German Shepherd whose Siddhartha-inspired self-mythology identifies with Fenris the Wolf of Norse mythology. They inhabit, in a way, their writers as well as their animal nature.

Why these stories succeed so well as these animals who are self-aware, who are well-read and oh-so-literate also remain animals. Their animal nature remains true, except perhaps for the chimpanzee, our genetic cousin, who is trying to become human.

Dovey skillfully adapts her writing style to the different animals and authors. From beat poet to ancient fable, the writing styles vary widely, but feel so very authentic for each animal narrator. She also explores the different reasons people will write from the animal perspective, whether to ask what it means to be human, to show that we too are merely animals, or to say the unsayable, the unthinkable by putting those words in the mouths of animals.

I enjoyed this book very much. It made me laugh. More often it made me sad, sometimes it even made me cry for these animals we use and risk and exploit in our wars, whose lives we value so much and then so little whether it’s pampering them as pets and abandoning them in crisis or spending years and small fortunes training them only to send them to their deaths. Our relationship with animals reveals so much about us and these stories, told by animals killed in our wars are telling us truths we might not want to hear. We should listen.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/05/07/only-the-animals-by-cerid... ( )

This is a book about animals. And they all get a chapter of their own.

The first one about a camel, well not a lot happened there.

The second one about a cat was better, and sad! A cat at the Western front. Meeting another cat, thinking about the owner, all while surviving.

Then we had such a creepy tale about a chimpanzee writing letter to the wife of the man who trained him to act human. I mean it was really good, but creepy.

The next story was about a dog, whose owner was into Hinduism, Buddhism, and the dog started to think about karma. Interesting.

Then came the beatnick mussel on the road. Well written.

After that a sad tortoise who met interesting people before going into space.

Then an elephant story, they are just so sad you know. They try to live their lives while people are at war.

The bear story was not any happier. It took place in Sarajevo. The bear starved while another bear told a story about a prince.

The next one was about dolphins trained for war. All stories start with the death date of the animal, so they are not happy.

And last, about a parrot. The end hit me there, why oh why.

Animals forgotten while people are at war. Animals trained for war. Animals just trying to live. I liked these stories. They are sad, thoughtful and quite wonderful. And they worked as short glimpses into a life of an animal. ( )