Klara and Loving the Zoo

Klara and Loving the Zoo

2001, fiction, Verlag Antje Kunstmann // re-issued in 2003 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch

“There were days on which Klara wanted to lean out the seventh-floor window and scream at everything …” At everything. Loudly. Because everything’s going great, but nothing is okay.

Eight months ago, she and her sixteen-year-old son—along with ninety-seven boxes and a few pieces of furniture—moved into George’s place in New York. She started unpacking until the moment he found her, unmoving, in front of box number twelve, holding a photo showing her with another man in the jungle twenty years ago. Klara finds herself powerless against the flashbacks that are now invading, without warning, her everyday life, as if the past were trying to take over the present, and she can’t do a thing about it. Screaming isn’t working, and her visits to a psychoanalyst are half-hearted.

On days like these, the only thing that helps is paying Gus a visit, the polar bear in the Central Park Zoo. Seventeen years ago, when she was wandering on her own, sleepwalking through New York for two weeks, and rather coincidentally ended up in front of the polar bear enclosure, he offered comfort against the overwhelming feeling of alienation. Back then, his name was Skandy.

Klara stumbles along the edge of the abyss between then and now, her gallows humor getting increasingly grim by the minute. She drifts through the stone, glass, and steel canyons of the city, surrenders herself to the languid sensuality of the Peruvian jungle, and joins a pack of Puerto Rican street dogs.

From laconic accounts of a completely normal everyday life, and excursions into the past, a story about a balancing act emerges, a woman’s tragicomic search for things to depend on in a world where nothing can be relied upon any more.