The Elephant

The Elephant, Slawomir Mrozek, Grove Press, 1984

This is an anthology of very short stories satirizing 1960's Polish communism.

A few examples: A lion refuses to take part in eating some Christians because it knows that one day, the Christians will be in power, and they will remember who was, and was not, nice to them. Another story is about a boy who asks his uncle what a giraffe looks like. The uncle, whose only reading material is on subjects like the subjective idealism of the world, looks in various Marxist books. Finding that they say nothing about giraffes, he tells his nephew that giraffes don't exist. An old man is assigned as night watchman over a swan in a lake. To help pass the long, cold nights, he takes the swan with him to a nearby pub where they both get drunk. The title story is about a suburban zoo that is allocated an elephant by the central government. In an attempt to save the government some money, the town officials decide to blow up a giant balloon in the shape of an elephant and tell the patrons that the elephant is very sluggish and hardly ever moves. This works for a while, until a gust of wind blows the elephant away.

These stories have been, accurately, compared to Franz Kafka with humor. They are very different, and very good.