The Pavilion for Small Mammals
by Patryk Pufelski
Description
“Noodle was one of the most important people in my life, despite weighing less than a kilogram and having four legs. I also think he was the only ferret in world history to visit every chapter of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.” (page 17)
The Pavilion for Small Mammals is the lightly fictionalised diary of contemporary Polish writer Patryk Pufelski. As a young, Jewish, openly gay zookeeper with a charming affinity for things past, his book offers answers to questions you didn’t know you had. How do you nanny a baby flamingo? Is being a vegetarian cyclist really enough to be an enemy of the Polish state? What does a friendship between a twenty-something-year-old, self-declared wannabe pensioner and an octogenarian Holocaust survivor look like? Spanning almost a decade, Pufelski chronicles his journey from dropping out of university to landing a zookeeping job of his dreams. He shares not only laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating anecdotes from his personal and professional life, but also offers moving pictures of his family history, the present-day Jewish community in Poland, and life as a queer person under a socially conservative government. All the while, animals leap off the page, not least pet ferrets, tarantulas and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. With seemingly effortless literary wit and endearing sensitivity to those around him – “all of them animals, some of them humans” – Pufelski’s Pavilion seems to be an effortless lesson on how the diary form can combine the personal with the political into an entertaining, heart-warming whole.
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Reviews
“(...) a remarkably likeable and unpretentious book. If mental health problems are truly commonplace nowadays, doctors and therapists should issue it as a prescription.” – Kinga Dunin, Krytyka Polityczna
“A would-be graduate of Hungarian Studies looking after penguins in a zoo, a gay man touring local chapters of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland with his ferret named Noodle, a teacher in a Jewish Sunday school who has friends a few generations older than him – does someone like this really exist? I assure you: he does, his name is Patryk Pufelski (...)” – Redakcja, Tygodnik Powszechny
“[Pufelski’s] great asset is the ability to reject a perspective of superiority, both in relationships with other humans and on a wider, interspecies level (...) He characterises [animals] as beings that think and feel, at the same time avoiding the trap of anthropomorphism.” – Paulina Małochleb, Książki na ostro
“There’s tremendous sensitivity and empathy emanating from this book. Reading it was like a beautiful, pink (...) plaster applied to my soul (...)” – Tomasz @czytomasz, a popular literary influencer on Instagram, BookTok and Goodreads
Author Biography
Patryk Pufelski, born in 1990 in Gdynia, is a Polish zookeeper. He works in Wrocław, at the oldest zoo in Poland, where he primarily takes care of monkeys, penguins, seals and shelducks. He is a member of the bookshop and cultural centre co-operative, Ogniwo, in Kraków. He currently studies zootechnology. The Pavilion for Small Mammals is his authorial debut.
Wydawnictwo Karakter
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Wydawnictwo Karakter
- Publication Date October 2022
- Orginal LanguagePolish
- ISBN/Identifier 9788367016384
- Publication Country or regionPoland
- FormatPaperback
- Primary Price 42 PLN
- Pages200
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitlePawilon małych ssaków
- Copyright Year2022
- Dimensions125x205 mm
- IllustrationN/A
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