Introduction

From “a writer of remarkable gifts,” “Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny—the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark.

Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.

Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.

“Smart, entertaining ... a marvelous hybrid of intellectual quest and well-plotted adventure.... A literary thriller in which—unusually—neither “literary” nor “thriller” seems an afterthought.”—Kirkus Reviews

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Excerpt

1

The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.

At all hours his roars reverberated, breaking into my sleep, rattling the windows. When he entered my doorway, he filled it. That was my earliest impression: he was bigger than the door. And he came from far away, smelling of the sea, snow fringing his thick coat and woolen cap.

We lived in four dark rooms. I shared a room with an old woman, my mother’s mother. My father slept in the room across the hall, tossing on the rusty box springs, snoring loudly. He was a restless sleeper, getting up many times in the night, his footfall heavy on the creaking boards. Then there was the kitchen, a low-ceilinged room with a black stove and a round table where my grandmother fed me.

When shadows moved through those rooms, brushing my skin like mist, I could hear their subtlest workings. Sound was my primary sense. The world seemed to be coming to me through my ears. Water trickling through wall pipes, steam knocking in the radiator, a mouse scratching, a fly buzzing. In sleep my grandmother’s breathing was punctuated by a whistle from the gap in her teeth. Everything else out of her mouth was a whisper. She whispered to me continuously, as she must once have whispered to my mother.

I believe my grandmother was telling me things, and when I came to understand words, they were already embedded in my consciousness. Dates, names, places that could not have arrived there by any other route. My grandmother’s history, my mother’s—the story of their lives, which I had just entered, a character in my own right.

My mother died in childbirth.

That was when my father began to roar. In my first year, this was how I knew him. Then one day he fell silent, as if he had dived into a deep pool inside himself from which, in my presence at least, he never truly emerged.

There was a dog and a cat. The first nonhuman beasts I would know. The dog was my grandmother’s. He was a German shepherd, black with a tan muzzle, named Re. He slept at the entrance to my room, like a sentry.

The cat had no name. She was orange, with white stripes and golden eyes. When she came to the windowsill from the fire escape, my grandmother fed her kitchen scraps. Sometimes the cat curled up beside me and slept. I remember her warmth, her small breath on my arm, the ticking of her tail against my ribs.

At night my grandmother held and rocked me, stroking my head or singing a lullaby. Her own bed felt far away in the darkness, like a ship across a deep harbor. Mostly I was alone, the window to my left, the door before me, the ceiling overhead lined with plaster cracks—a map of some nonexistent place I studied.

A part of us never leaves the first room we occupy. Everything I was to hear, see, or feel first took shape in that room. It was a world—with landmarks, climate, a population—splintered infinitesimally off the bigger world. The air was dark blue. It moved. Was ruled by currents. Ripples. Fevers of motions.

I felt the spirits of animals. In the instants of entering or leaving sleep I caught glimpses of them: an upturned snout, a lizard eye, a glinting talon, the flash of a wing. Hooves kicked up sparks by my cheek. Fur bristled. Teeth clicked. I heard pants. Howls. Plaintive cries.

And at dawn they were gone.

The first imaginary animal I ever saw leapt out at me from my father’s back. He was shirtless, shaving in a cloud of steam with the bathroom door open, when I came up behind him. Inked in blues and reds—with flashes of yellow—the tattoo looked alive, undulating with every movement of my father’s muscles, from his shoulders to his waist.

It was a sea serpent. A long scaly body with a horse’s head. Flaming mane, fiery tail fin, bared fangs, glowing eyes. A terrifying hybrid. It was surfacing through cresting waves, beneath clouds torn by lightning, with foam streaming off its back.

I cried out, and my father wheeled around, shaving cream on his chin and his razor frozen in midair. Kneeling down, he patted my cheek and reassured me that there was nothing to fear. I didn’t agree. To this day, it is the most fearsome tattoo I’ve ever seen.

“It scares away evil spirits when I’m at sea,” he said.

To me, it was an evil spirit.

My father was the man who shoveled coal into the furnace on a freighter. His name was Theodore. His hands were huge, his arms and shoulders knotted like wood. His back so solid it had once bent a knife blade when he was jumped in an alley. He had black eyes, curly black hair, and a thick, close-cropped beard. His eyebrows met above his hooked nose. He wore a heavy medallion on a chain around his neck. When I first saw images of pirates in a picture book, I thought this was what he must be.

Usually he was away for two months at a time. When he came home, even after he had bathed every day for a week, the coal dust still adhered to his hair, his skin, his breath. He would be talking and a black wisp would trail the end of a sentence.

Ports he visited in one year alone: Hamburg, Marseilles, Singapore, Murmansk, Caracas, Montevideo, Sydney. He sailed through the Panama and Suez canals, around Cape Horn and through the Strait of Magellan. He followed the equator across the Indian Ocean from the Seychelles to the Maldives.

Sometimes he sent a postcard from a foreign port. Only one of these has survived, yellowed and crumpled: a tinted photograph of the open-air fish market in the harbor at Tangier. Rows of sardines gleaming silver on rickety carts. The sun casting webbed shadows through the nets hung to dry. A man in a kaftan beating the ink from squid on the seawall. As a boy, I could almost smell the harbor. From the stamp on the other side a man in a red fez gazed out severely. My father’s laborious print, in watery ink, turned pale brown over the years. He was a man of few words, written or otherwise.

Arrived Friday, leave Tuesday for Alexandria. Raining. —Theodore Atlas

His name signed in full. The card addressed to “Atlas,” and then our street address.

His parents, married as teenagers, had emigrated from Crete. Their village was perched in the mountains of the interior, amid jagged cliffs, deep ravines, and pine forests. Its inhabitants were like the man Odysseus was told to watch for when he traveled to remote lands carrying an oar—a man who, never having set eyes on the sea, would ask him if the oar was a winnowing fan. These Cretans were farmers and goatherds who never ventured more than ten miles from the houses in which they had been born and would die. My grand- parents were an exception.

They settled in the Bronx and died before my father turned sixteen, his mother of diphtheria, his father in an accident on the docks. Like me, my father was an only child, and he had no other relatives in America. Having to support himself suddenly, he dropped out of school. Already over six feet, he could pass for eighteen. He might have become a stevedore, like his father, but instead went to sea, signing on to a freighter flying the Colombian flag, bound for Lisbon.

He had only seen the Atlantic from Jones Beach and Far Rockaway. Just as his ancestors had lived within a tight radius of their village, he had rarely left the South Bronx and only once—a week in the Catskills—been out of New York City. The open sea stunned him. His father had told him that only the sky above the mountains in Crete was bluer, so close to the mountaintops you could reach it by scaling the tallest tree. My father claimed to have done just that on his first visit to his parents’ village, several years after I was born—the most expansive statement I ever heard him make.

Still, however, nothing he ever said or did in those days compared in scope to his tattoo. I never really got used to it. And I never forgot that it was there, so at odds with the drab inexpensive clothing that covered it.

When I asked my father about it one day, he told me he had been tattooed in Osaka, Japan. He said he was twenty-five years old at the time. Which meant my mother had lived with it. I wondered what she thought when she saw it for the first time—if it frightened her, too—and how she felt sleeping beside it at night. Even among Japanese sailors this particular tattoo was uncommon. The image was so ferocious that many regarded it as a challenge to the sea gods, which could as easily provoke as appease them.

I encountered the tattoo twice more in my life. The first time was on the docks in Tokyo, where I was boarding a ferry. Three young Japanese sailors, shirtless in the afternoon sun, were awaiting a dinghy that would return them to their ship. One of them turned into the wind to light a cigarette, and there was the sea serpent on his back, vividly colored. I stopped and stared, moving on only when the sailors stared back.

Excerpted from The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher Copyright © 2007 by Nicholas Christopher. Excerpted by permission of The Dial Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the Publisher:

1. The hero of THE BESTIARY, Xeno Atlas, must solve the mystery of the CARAVAN BESTIARY even as he unravels the mysteries of his own life. Gradually his twin quests merge and become the great spiritual journey of his life. Did the fact that -- like most of us -- he was searching both for something magical and something very human make him an even fuller character?

2. To some degree, at various times in our lives we search for something we have lost, whether it be a person, an object, a strong passion, or even a fleeting emotion. Xeno has "lost" both his parents, his mother in childbirth, his father to the deep secrets the man harbors. Do you think it is these losses, rather than intellectual curiosity or an appetite for mystery that impel him to dedicate his life to searching for a lost book?

3. The three main characters of the novel -- Xeno, Lena, and Bruno -- are each involved with animals in different ways: Bruno with extinction; Lena with animal rights; and Xeno with the way animals populate the human imagination and help define who we are in the world. How did these three aspects of the story play off of, and enrich, one another?

4. Xeno's wartime experiences in Vietnam, and their aftermath when he is a returning, wounded veteran, are one of several times that he finds himself in "the belly of the beast." How does this make his interest in a book of beasts -- some of them quite dangerous and lethal -- all the more poignant?

5. Nicholas Christopher weaves a great many historical events and personalities into his novel: the Black Death, the Crusades, illuminated manuscripts, Gnostic heretics, ancient historians, the Knights Hospitallers, Lord Byron, Doge Andrea Dandolo. How did this use of history enliven the modern-day action of the story?

6. There are numerous locales that are central to the novel: the Bronx, Vietnam, Hawaii, Venice, Paris, Crete. What did you think of the way they were depicted, and of the details the author used to animate the action that takes place in them?

7. Lena is the great love of Xeno's life, and Nathalie is a woman with whom he is involved for less than two years. At different points in their lives, both young women are fervent political activists. What, if anythng, does this say about Xeno? Are the women similiar in other ways? And how would you otherwise contrast them?

8. How do you believe Xeno's relationships with his grandmother and Evgénia shaped him, in light of his father's neglect?"

9. Xeno adopts the Moretti family as his own, filling a huge vacuum in his own life. Discuss the complex web of relationships with Mrs. Moretti, Bruno, and most importantly, Lena, and the way it evolves over the years.

10. How did the device of Xeno's ongoing notebooks (often found in the book's footnotes, and in the Glossary), and his discovery of different imaginary animals help you to understand his quest, and the development of his character?

11. Along the way, many people assist Xeno in his quest, offering him crucial information and encouragement, notably Mr. Hood and Vartan Marczek, who also become friends, and even father figures, to Xeno. Discuss the different ways in which these two men, who share a thirst for knowledgment and is each involved in his own unique project, influence Xeno.

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