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A Novel
by María Ospina
Book Reviewed by:This prizewinning novel interweaves four animal odysseys in a gripping, adventurous meditation on migration and displacement in the inextricable human and natural worlds.
In Only a Little While Here, award-winning author María Ospina evokes the gratification to be found through close, humble observation of nature. With characteristic precision and intensity, Ospina trains our attention on the lives of five creatures: a migratory songbird dazzled by city lights, an orphaned porcupine saved by kindness, two dogs grieving the loss of their human companions, and a determined beetle transported to a vast, unimaginable world. The surprising drama of their lives reveals the fragility and power of belonging, and what it means to create—or lose—a home. Along the way, our narrator models the attentiveness needed to mend the rift between humans and non-human creatures and celebrates animals' often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world.
Alive with eagle-eyed curiosity, Only a Little While Here is ecological fiction at its most soul stirring.
Excerpt
Only a Little While Here
He has no desire for skyscrapers; what he wants is forest. But he must be exhausted, and this time, despite the wisdom of his fibers, he does not seem to know how to find it. Nor do the others. Bewitched by the light, they swirl around the sharp tip of a building that attracts and ignores them, that flaunts its electric victory, its hunger for steel and glass, for cables and ownership, and shoots them through with its glow. The meteorological radar captures them that night in their trance, though not entirely. Thousands of restless bodies amass in the form of a vast green stain that clouds the experts' screens. Later, a distressed scientist will analyze the image and report the disaster. But the radar is not able to reveal the thrust of those, the feathers in frantic movement, the fury of wings and tail feathers flashing in the glow of that deceptive high-rise. Yellow, gray, and spotted birds; brown, red, and greenish-black ones; white, orange, and blue. ...
Throughout, Ospina painstakingly avoids imposing human-like thoughts and feelings onto her animal characters, or, as in the fate of the june bug, conveying human-centered feelings of regret or sadness at the troubles they encounter. Animals are always described by their behavior rather than via the interiority of their thoughts, and the frequent statements about their underlying feelings or motivations are carefully couched in conditional language. On the one hand, this is an intriguing and admirable method of ensuring that the animals are depicted on their own terms, not portrayed as quasi-humans in furry or feathery clothing. But the resulting prose can feel at times almost exhausting in its repeated speculations. The point being made here is that humans cannot pretend to understand animals on our terms, only on theirs, which are largely opaque to us. What's left to Ospina, then, is to position these inscrutable animals against a backdrop of human concerns, which at times are used to relate metaphorically to the creatures' journeys toward or away from home...continued
Full Review
(833 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Fernanda Trías, author of Pink Slime
A superb exercise in otherness. Mónica Ojeda, author of Jawbone
Beautiful, rare, and poetic... It is impossible to resist the tenderness and sharpness of Ospina's words.
Near the beginning of a section in María Ospina's novel Only a Little While Here that chronicles the southward migration of a scarlet tanager, the bird narrowly escapes a fate that dooms dozens of his fellow migrators. Traveling through the landscape of New York City on the way from Connecticut to the forests of Colombia, the tanager and others grow confused by the skyscrapers, becoming "disoriented wings and weary bodies that before this trap were all purpose and thirst for their destination."
Nestled inside the poetic language with which Ospina describes this scene is a very real phenomenon. According to the NYC Bird Alliance, whose Project Safe Flight helps document victims of urban bird strikes, between 90,000 and 230,000 ...
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