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Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction)

Stemming from a through-line of marital discord in the household of the great French vivisector, Claude Bernard, Thalia Field has discovered a number of voices, some famous, some forgotten, and allowed them all a moment in which to be heard again. This compelling tale is made up largely of excerpts and quotations, pieced together with great artistry. A beautiful and thought-provoking collage of a tale of rescued history and a sobering tribute to some of its victims. — Karen Joy Fowler

Advancing what she started twenty years ago with her earliest explorations of essayistic fiction, Thalia Field has now composed what very well might be her life's work — a tragic, comical, and utterly fascinating tale of a marriage that vividly encapsulates not only the origins of experimental medicine, but an entire age that spirited experiments in literature, science, engineering, film, etc. It's nothing less than a history — gorgeously fictional, purposefully essayistic — of how we got where we are. — John D'Agata

Why does only the past provide material that burns? Thalia Field asks in her novel Experimental Animals, an impassioned investigation of the marriage of a feisty accidental activist, Fanny, to French physiologist Claude Bernard, whose experiments transformed medicine, but at a steep ethical price: they depended on the vivisection of animals. Like Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals), Field is on the side of the animals, but her novel does justice, in its form, to the weight and complexity of the problem. Knowledge depends on violence; to understand life, we have to break it to pieces, and to see the past in a new light, we have to burn up old ideas. Field's novel is an experiment which illuminates the history of experimentation; it's a wise and brilliant work of compassionate destruction. — Paul La Farge

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 264
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780986235535
  • Genres
  • fiction, literature
  • Release date
  • 2016