Colin Dayan meditates on the connection between her personal and family
history and her relationship with animals in this lyrical memoir about
her upbringing in the South. Unraveling memories alongside family
documents and photographs, Animal Quintet takes a raw look at racial
tensions and relations in a region struggling to change while providing
a disquieting picture of a childhood accessible only through accounts of
the non-human, ranging from famed Southern war horses led by Civil War
generals and doomed Spanish fighting bulls to the lowly possum hunted by
generations of Southerners. Placing the reader in the mind's eye of a
writer still grappling with her own mixed identity and unsettled past,
the book is uniquely capable of transporting one's imagination across
time and place, mirroring the natural behavior of remembrances with its
feeling of dislocation and non-linear movement. Regional folk songs
about old gray mares and possums hiding in trees intermingle with
stories and confidences shared by the household's African-American
nanny, enclosing the reader in a chorus composed of otherwise lost
voices. Presented in a such a way that it simultaneously longs for the
past and attempts to keep it at arm's length, Animal Quintet achieves a
haunting, nostalgic quality rare to memoirs focused on ancestral and
personal identity.
