That is the first line for Nicholas Christopher's truly wonderful new book, The Bestiary. It is not a book about an abusive parent, and the narrator's father is not at all a monster. He is however distant and preoccupied and very nearly always gone. And when he is home he is intimidating in his silence, so the sentence is perfectly apt for the young man's relationship. (I happened to be watching a rerun of a 60 Minutes interview with Date Earnhardt Jr the other night and he said he was always intimidated by his father - even though he wanted to be around him when he was home, he was always certain to be across the room. That seemed the sort of relationship Christopher was conveying with this sentence.)

I am a big fan of Christopher's work and I think he is horribly overlooked by readers (like Scarlett Thomas). I really hope this proves to be the breakout book for him. The Bestiary is about Xenos Atlas and how he grows up and becomes consumed with a quest for the "Caravan Bestiary". That book is as described in the dj: "This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark - griffins, hipogriffs, manticores, and basilisks - the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own."

Like all of his work, The Bestiary touches on history and relationships and is also part coming-of-age novel. The writing is gorgeous and I already find myself slowing down as I read it - trying to draw out the experience and put off the moment when I will come to the end.

I love it when a book makes me want to read slow.

Here's a couple of favorite passages so far:

Thrilled by all I'd heard, I was determined to undertake my own quest for the Caravan Bestiary. I wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but later realized it was one of those rare instances in which a youhtful enthusiasm that could have evaporated instead grew more powerful each year. Even the fact I was a schoolboy with no credentials ended up working to my advantage: who else in his right mind would have had the hubris even to contemplate such a project - searching for something that had disappeared seven hundred years before I was born - undaunted by the failures of expert predecessors and ignorant of obstacles before him? I now know how fortunate I had been, not just to have a man like Mr. Hood [his history teacher] come into my life, but to have learned of the Caravan Beastiary when I was so young, equipped with vast stores of energy and little knowledge of the world.

What I love about that passage is it shows exactly how you do feel when you are a teenager - that maybe you can be the one to do something that has eluded everyone else; that you could find the treasure or write the song or challenge the status quo. And then you get all those words about responsibility dumped on you and everyone tells you that you must get the right job and grow up and somehow believing you can do something amazing or great or even a little foolish becomes lost. And you don't even try anymore - in fact you forget even how to try.

This one I loved for obvious reasons. Re was the main character's dog who passed away from old age:

Two weeks later Bruno sent me Re's ashes. I opened the package in the bathroom, away from the other boys, tears flooding my eyes. The ashes were in a tight gray packet the size of a brick. I couldn't believe my dog's bodily self had been reduced to that. Bruno also sent along Re's leather collar and the medallion imprinted with his name, my name and my old address. I placed them and the ashes alongside my grandmother's music box in the trunk under my bed. Now Re's spirit joined hers and my mother's.

Throughout my stay at school, I felt his presence, not as a shadowy mist, but a weight that shifted gently at the end of the bed, or a rustle in the shadows, or a brushing against my leg when I walked in the woods.

There's much more than this - for example his teacher, Mr. Hood, is researching a book about all the cities Alexander the Great founded. "There were eighteen Alexandria's," he explained. "Alexander chose the sites himself: in Persia, India, even Siberia. Only the Egyptian Alexandria survives. In Scythia, Alexandria was a city of sandstone towers. By the Indus River, it was a sprawl of canals, with houses on stilts. The Babylonian Alexandria contained a zoo, with exotic animals from around his empire. Kabul, Afghanistan, was one of the Alexandrias."

Fascinating stuff and as I know so little of ancient history, I'm quite enjoying all the bits of truth Christopher drops in his novel for his readers to pursue later on their own.

The book is due out next week - I'll be writing it up for Bookslut in August and I can't recommend it enough.