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.
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