A Valencian writer, Purificació Mascarell, has gathered together in an incredible anthology stories that place animals at the center of the story. "Animals are the perfect metaphor to talk about us, humans.
A resource to allude to our feelings and defects, our emotions and inabilities," she says. John Berger draws attention to the theme that animals were the primitive paints, and their blood was surely the first pigment. The Animated Tale is published by Piatkus, priced £16.99, and is available in Spanish, English, and French. For more information, visit www.piatkus.co.uk or go to the website of the publisher, Piotkus, in Spain. Kafka uses all the symbolic power that he knew how to wield in The Metamorphosis and The Trial. "In the literary stories of modernity, the animals are themselves, they are real animals, but they function as symbols and contain the interpretive key to the entire literary scaffolding," says Mascarell. We tame animals because our socialization involves a lot of taming, in fact, and sometimes we are so envious of the absolute freedom that animals experience that we need to cruelly take it away from them to feel less mediocre and stronger compared to them, he adds. The writer remembers how she became so infatuated with a firefly in her childhood that she took it home and put it in a box. In the story of Felicidad, a humble servant who is the protagonist of a story by Flaubert, she gives all her affection to a parrot. There are beings that mistreat animals, others humanize them, and some even deify them, we say.