![]() For my money it’s an opening that threatens to cripple the work completely, and if Ledgard gets away with it, it’s because we’re prepared to be indulgent toward what is by any standard an ambitious and remarkable first novel. If this is the kind of thing you like, you’re going to like this novel a lot. ![]() If you’re going to read only one novel this year that has an opening chapter narrated by a newly born giraffe, why shouldn’t it be this one? Finding a convincing “voice” for such a creature is obviously going to test any novelist, and this giraffe, named Snehurka, appears to have attended a rather perfervid creative writing class: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hooves impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Camelopardalis into the Earth’s atmosphere.” ![]()
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