“Prosp had become his doctor and provider,” it is once said. Elsewhere you can read: “It was certainly due to his courageous nature that Prosp recovered from his injuries, including the psychological ones.” A little later: “Prosp cried.” Now you have to know that Prosp is not a human being, but a bird is. More precisely, a great auk. The flightless species has been considered extinct since the mid-nineteenth century. Two specimens were killed in 1844 on the island of Eldey, southwest of Iceland. They made the last reliably documented breeding attempt of the species. Eight years later, an individual was said to have been spotted near Newfoundland. The bird has never appeared anywhere since.
The French author and publisher Sibylle Grimbert has dedicated a historical novel to the great auk, “The Last of its Kind,” which, considering the premise, could have failed in some respects: the zoologist Gus travels to Iceland and experiences how wild sailors among the to cause a massacre of the great auks that live there, fishes one of the birds out of the water, takes it home, calls it Prosp (short for Prosperous), regularly leads it on a leash to the sea, changes residences with it, studies it, likes it , feels for him and in the end is so fond of him that everyday life only revolves around the animal, which in turn makes his wife and children suffer.
Something inaccurate, botched
Grimbert describes all of this in a tone elegantly translated into German by Sabine Schwenk, which also highlights those aspects of the plot that could quickly have become a lesson for less well-versed authors. This includes, for example, considerations of anthropological difference, i.e. the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between humans and animals. Grimbert’s personal narrator communicates what is happening, but continually lets the event pass through Gus’s perceptual filter.
When it is said that the auk suffers from psychological injuries, when there is talk of the “sorrow” and “shame” of a humiliated animal, it is not a case of naive humanization on the part of the author. Rather, with the help of the chosen narrative instance, it brings us closer to the protagonist’s attitude. The content depends on the form. In the world depicted, the situation is reversed: if the content in Gus’s life is missing, the protagonist falls out of form. If his wife and Prosp are not around, “there was something imprecise, botched about his every step; he felt he was unfinished.”
No reason for aesthetically packaged moral philosophy
The narrator regularly lists categories that could be used to describe the character constellation. For example, Gus and Prosp are not connected to each other by “love or friendship,” nor by “any form of secret consent.” No, Gus felt responsible.” What he initially doesn’t want to admit becomes a certainty over the course of the book – the great auk is dying out. Our planet, the hero believes, is a “place of abundance” and the “harmony in the living world did not allow anything to be extinguished here on earth.”
This view loses its naivety as soon as one considers that the action begins in 1834, at a time when Darwin was still traveling on board the Beagle. “On the Origin of Species” was published in 1859; Gus and his contemporaries therefore have no idea that evolution exists. Whether a species can disappear forever is a debate that was primarily waged by paleontologists in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The theme of the novel invites you to use it as an argumentative platform for a good cause. Humans are ruining the earth, exploiting entire areas of land and are responsible for the sixth mass extinction. Horrific, certainly, but no reason for aesthetically packaged moral philosophy. The author is careful not to use her story in the service of a cause in which her own, equally sober and emphatic language would be contaminated by common outrage language. In this respect, the blurb is wrong when it emphasizes that the novel is a “moving commentary on one of the most important debates of our time”.
However, this does not mean that the staff behave indifferently or are not concerned about the environment. The whole book is a reflection on the role of humans in nature, on the possibility of seeing the world through the eyes of a bird, on communication and language in great auks, on the spirit of animals, which, according to the differentialists, is essentially different from the of man, which the assimilationists object to and claim that any differences are purely quantitative. “The Last of His Kind” is full of questions about animal philosophy, and yet reading it never gives you the feeling of attending a seminar. More touching, cleverer, in short: a novel about the relationship between humans and animals could hardly be better.
Sibylle Grimbert: “The last of his kind”. Novel. Translated from French by Sabine Schwenk. Eisele Verlag, Munich 2023. 256 pages, hardcover, 23 euros.
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