Inside a zebra

Inside a zebra
Micaela Chirif / Renato Moriconi
Buenos Aires: Limonero, 2018
ISBN 978-987-45988-8-2

♦ Honorable Mention – New York Rights Fair Talking Pictures Award
♦ White Ravens 2019

Sometimes we see life from the front and sometimes only from the side. Sometimes we look at it through a window, from a balcony or protected behind huge sunglasses. There are times when we see it all in impossible squares and times when life paints itself as pink. On some occasion we have all seen what surrounds us from a peculiar place, but… have you ever wondered what life would look like from inside a zebra?

Comments

A beautiful and strange book. As strange as living inside a zebra. As beautiful as learning to fly.
Taller del caracol (The snail’s workshop)

WHAT A BOOK! What a book… unlike anything I’ve ever read, a strange, uncomfortable, puzzling reading. It is impossible to end this reading and remain indifferent, in fact, it is impossible not to read this book over and over again to be able to understand the various layers, the empty spaces, the expressions of the figures…
Blog do livrinho (The book blog)

What’s special about this book is that its text is hermetic and puzzling, but at the same time open and conducive to many interpretations. The first-person narrator explains that for a time he lived inside a zebra, until the zebra asked whether the two of them ought not “move on”, at which point they flew away into the clouds. What this zebra is – an actual animal, or a space, a location, or a particular mental attitude, an emotion, a dream… – remains unclear. The answer is irrelevant, though. It is this very ambiguity that makes Micaela Chirif’s text captivating: No explanation is given, no resolution is offered, which is why readers must define its meaning – or perhaps its lack thereof – for themselves.
White Ravens Catalogue 2019