Title: Giraffe
Author: J.M. Ledgard
Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 978-0-14-303896-2
Pages: 298
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 29-31 August, 2007

This is a very strange novel, which I abandoned half way through. The last book that I abandoned was simply wretched in every way, but this one is beautifully written.

Giraffe is also utterly, maddeningly pointless. It tells the (apparently) true story of the slaughter of a large herd of captive giraffes at a Czechoslovakian zoo in 1973. The main narrator is a hemodynamicist escorting a newly captured herd of giraffes as they are transported by barge from Hamburg to the Czech zoo. He is a depressed-sounding young man with little liking for the Communist regime, mired in an existential ennui. The entire book reads like a dream sequence, based on the half that I read and the half that I flicked through, hoping against hope that it would finally repay the time that I had spent on it. Some reviewers clearly loved it, but it did nothing for me. Altogether a very odd book for a Scot born in 1968 to have written.