Just as everyone has given up on ever getting Mango out of the hole, the story goes in a surprising directionAnimal. The first episode begins almost like a horror story. Our narrator accidentally cracks a floorboard while fixing something on a ladder in his daughter’s room, opening up a gaping black hole in the floor. He neglects to repair this hole, and into it, eventually, falls his daughter’s pet hamster Mango.
This small domestic drama ends well, with Walnut, with the help of Anderson, rescuing the hamster from the dark interior of the house. But the story is saturated in sadness, and becomes, in the end, about mortality – about a previous beloved dog who had died, and about the more recent and painful loss of his father.
There’s an episode, ostensibly about wolves, where Anderson goes to a forest outside Kyoto, to visit the statue of the last remaining Japanese wolf; the whole thing winds up being not about wolves at all, but about the taxi driver who drives him to the wolf statue, the story he tells about his own beloved pet chihuahua Gotaro, and the physical abuse Gotaro suffered at the hands of his father-in-law.
My favourite episode, and the one that really exemplifies the series’s particular charm and sly profundity, is the finale, on bats – the one animal Anderson outright despises. It opens with Anderson reading a truly execrable poem by DH Lawrence, about his own disgust for bats. The poem concludes, as he puts it, “with the dumbest ending I’ve ever encountered in the work of a major writer”. That line: “In China the bat is symbol for happiness.
Ireland Latest News, Ireland Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: IrishTimes - 🏆 3. / 98 Read more »
Source: RSVPMagazine - 🏆 7. / 76 Read more »
Source: RSVPMagazine - 🏆 7. / 76 Read more »
Source: RSVPMagazine - 🏆 7. / 76 Read more »
Source: IrishMirror - 🏆 4. / 98 Read more »
Source: IrishTimes - 🏆 3. / 98 Read more »