shimmer's review
5.0
It's exceptionally hard to describe Palafox in any way that does justice to the book, or gives a true sense of the experience reading it. In a nutshell—better, in this case: in an eggshell—it's about a strange creature appearing on a family's breakfast table and taking over their lives and their story. But the plot's not the point here. The animal, Palafox, sometimes seems like a bird and at others a jellyfish and still others a dragon or dog. Sometimes he's huge and sometimes he's tiny, growing and shrinking even in the course a single paragraph or page. Everything else in the story is equally slippery: it's a romance, a hunting story, a war story, a family drama, etc., and the way Chevillard's language (via Wyatt Mason's translation) circles back on and rewrites itself constantly. It's the pleasure of all that, just the sheer joy of reading this book, that's hard to describe, because while there are any number of novels about strange creatures, monsters, and the like (a favorite subject of mine), there are a few if any others in which the playfulness of subject and style come together so smoothly as they do here.
cariannbradley's review
2.0
Picked this up at random in a bookstore years ago. I respect the very interesting writing style, but it wasn’t for me.
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