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A review by ifyouhavebooks
Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan
3.0
An exceptional book that I think poses many important questions in regards to how we, as humans, treat animals and nature around us. I love the important topics this book covers, as it is sorely needed today but Tan's writing style just wasn't for me. It often took me out of the story and I would have to read it again, but despite this I truly love everything this book represents and stands for. My favorite stories were about the horses, butterflies, dogs, and sharks. Below I have typed three lengthy but important quotes that are the most meaningful to me from the book. I know I will always come back to them and I hope this pushes you to give this book a chance.
"Horses bought and sold, groomed and beaten, working to sleep and sleeping to work, and fires lit under their bellies when they failed to rouse in the quiet hours before any other creature is expected to stir. Carved in the timbers of multistory stables, the mantra of their keepers: Sentiment pays no dividend. Horses know this more than most. The greatest curse of any animal is to be worth money to men."
"Only the souls of horses are, mercifully, of no use to men, not worth a dollar. They shake themselves loose. They dream of running along some green and grassy ancestral plain. They'll never find it."
"The city demands no requiem for the faithful, only further coin from a knackered corpse: stripped down for dog meat and candle fat, bones burned and ground down into fertilizer, skins tooled into straps and fastened to the withers of their offspring, ligaments boiled for furniture glue, and like some terrible, belated retribution, a blight of fly-borne typhoid rising up from fast pits of manure that nobody knows what to do with."
"Horses bought and sold, groomed and beaten, working to sleep and sleeping to work, and fires lit under their bellies when they failed to rouse in the quiet hours before any other creature is expected to stir. Carved in the timbers of multistory stables, the mantra of their keepers: Sentiment pays no dividend. Horses know this more than most. The greatest curse of any animal is to be worth money to men."
"Only the souls of horses are, mercifully, of no use to men, not worth a dollar. They shake themselves loose. They dream of running along some green and grassy ancestral plain. They'll never find it."
"The city demands no requiem for the faithful, only further coin from a knackered corpse: stripped down for dog meat and candle fat, bones burned and ground down into fertilizer, skins tooled into straps and fastened to the withers of their offspring, ligaments boiled for furniture glue, and like some terrible, belated retribution, a blight of fly-borne typhoid rising up from fast pits of manure that nobody knows what to do with."