A story about a rather evil genetic engineer, a very cute pink elephant and the people determined to save her from being used and abused for the purpose of science.

I enjoyed listening to this story where we see a man suffering from homelessness and alcoholism change his life when he accidentally ends up in charge of a miniature elephant who needs his help - there are lots of heartwarming moment in this that an animal lover will appreciate, and while some bits are hard to read (baby elephants being killed at the start of the book, and general cruelty/handling of circus elephants), the overall message of the book is well received - animals should be allowed to be animals, and humans are gross.

I enjoyed this book when I read it, however I did not get to submit full review in time as unfortunately I lost my devices when my house was burgled and it took me a long time to replace my belongings and just get back on track. I have an ereader again (and a laptop, although I am not reactivating my blog and have started a bookstagram instead) and I hope to review again in the future.

What?
I'm sorry, What?
This was my reaction to this book. Confusing and random with occasional bursts of confuddlement. I don't know if maybe I missed something or it got lost in translation for me but it was a step too far into the surreal for me. DNF

A homeless man sees a tiny pink elephant....give him a pitying glance and move on. Yet this story was so much more than I expected. Much more than meets the eye. Just like the man and his little elephant. When our story protagonist wakes up and discovers he is not hallucinating, he had not drunk too much and finally lost it, he becomes a protector of this tiny lab experiment. Fighting off the circus, big pharma, and finding friends, and more along the way. I laughed, I cried, I didn't want the book to end.

This was an interesting yet very sad book; I fell in love with the little elephant. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

This is a beautiful story, rampant with great language and imagery. It pulled at my heartstrings and was a lovely tale of friendship. Have bought it for a few people since, it makes a lovely gift!

A very sweet story, Elefant really highlighted a lot of what is good about people, as well as some of what is not so good.

Elefant by Martin Suter. The unusual story about a tiny pink elephant that glows in the dark, the dubious reason it was born and how many lives were enhanced or ruined by its existence. I enjoyed the book but hope I never get to see such an elephant! x




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Ann Hutt
12 mins
Well, I thought I would try something different and thank you to NetGalley.

A really unusual book, mixing genetics, romance and drama with homelessness, as well as starting near the end of the story and working through to that point in time.
I found the story fascinating, and the subject matter was close to my heart, with a love for elephants, that made me choose this title to read.
A story that seems fiction, but could so easily change to fact

This is an extremely adorable novel about a Swiss vagrant named Schoch who awakens one morning to find himself faced with a small pink elephant. Initially convinced that the elephant is a manifestation of DTs, he soon finds that it's real and the product of an unethical biological experiment by a glory-hunting scientist, whom he must thwart at all costs. The beats of the story are hardly unfamiliar, and it's not high-brow (it reminded me a lot of Jonas Jonasson), but it's good cute fun.

Absolutely brilliant - A Thriller with a message

When I started reading I had little idea of just how good "Elefant" would prove to be. Usually book descriptions over-rate a book but that is not the case with "Elefant".
The fluorescent pink elephant on the book cover is perfect symbolism of the animal which remains at the core of this novel throughout. As Schoch, the book's main character, catches his first sight of a live, tiny, fluorescent pink elephant which has sought refuge in the down-and-out's cave, puts it, "It couldn't be withdrawal syndrome as he'd had plenty to drink." And so Sabu makes her entry.
A product of genetic engineering, the little elephant called Sabu (and sometimes Barisha) has a background which the reader will learn and is the focus of a bitter custody battle throughout most of the book. This novel is a thriller believe it or not. With the good guys (like Schoch, Valerie and Kaung) trying to save the little elephant from exploitation by the bad guys (those who basically had a hand in genetically engineering her in the first place).
All the genetic science which created Sabu is basically already available. Frightening really. In this roller-coaster of a thriller we learn the ways of drop-outs, and some of their sad stories. The novel features occasional flashbacks as the reader learns the background to Sabu's birth and Schoch's previous life. Redemption is on hand when, thanks to Sabu, Schoch meets Valerie and Schoch's life takes a slow turn for the better. In addition to genetic engineering, "Elefant" also deals with animal welfare, greed and poverty of both mind and body.
This is a novel which everyone will enjoy. It has something for everyone. The translator, Jamie Bulloch, deserves so much praise for retaining the essence of humour in the English translation. Amongst my favourite lines in the book comes as the reader learns how Schoch happened to inherit the cave by the river, after the sudden death of his friend, Sumi. Sumi had been "drying" out. Thus "this had strengthened Schoch's resolve never to stop drinking."
An uplifting novel which combines wonderful observation and humour with an intelligent storyline this is not a book to miss. Brilliant.

Schoch is a middle-aged man living on the street in Zürich and he’s getting by. He has a place to sleep, in a cave along the river banks near the allotments, he knows all the places to go to get adequate food and he could give up drinking any time he wanted to. Giving up drinking is easy – he’s done it lots of times – but when a terrier-sized, pink, glow-in-the-dark, elephant maybe it is time to quit for good. With a cast of alcoholics, circus-folk, evil scientists, vets and refugees this is a heartwarming book which looks at all kinds of issues around life, love and genetic modification. Partly because of the development of the character of Schoch as we unravel the life that led to him being on the streets, partly because of the warmth and humanity of Kuang, the Burmese oozie (or neck rider) and partly because of the elephant itself. Okay, maybe, more than just partly because of the elephant – what’s not to love about a glowing pachyderm small enough to sit on your lap? This is, in fact, the crux of the story – just because an elephant is only a foot high doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be treated like a proper elephant. And just because it is possible to create such a creature doesn’t mean we should. Add into this all that we learn about life on the streets, including how much the inhabitants care for their dogs, and elephant care and it is a very entertaining and interesting read. Although I now also know more about artificial insemination of elephants than I ever wanted to know…

When I read the synopsis and saw that this book was about a tiny glow-in-the-dark pink elephant, I knew I had to read it. Elefant's narration switches between the past, when the pink elephant is being genetically engineered and present, when the elephant is found by a homeless man named Schoch. The first storyline of the novel follows doctors and elephant caretakers as they try to make a tiny elephant that glows in the dark a reality through genetic engineering. It leads to a messy ordeal as the people involved argue about the ethics of creating a tiny pink elephant for solely selfish reasons. For Schoch, an alcoholic who has taken to living on the streets after a bitter divorce, the tiny pink elephant is a symbol for second chances. While taking care of the tiny pink elephant he names Sabu, Schoch comes to realise he should give life another shot.
While the book is scientific and serious throughout, Sabu and the side characters provide enough lightheartedness to perfectly balance the mood. The book is a morality tale that tackles a lot of controversial topics like genetic engineering, alcoholism, homelessness, faith and others. It discusses them in such a way that is both gripping and eye=opening. While I expected the friendship between Sabu and Schoch to be the main focal point of the novel, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed what the book actually turned out to be about. The story is wholly unique and the themes resonated with me long after I finished the book.

This short novel at first seems freakish, then draws the reader in to its premise. A down and out man in Zurich huddles in a riverbank cave out of the rain, and sees a tiny pink elephant moving in the darkness. The ELEFANT is also glowing.

We slip back a couple of years to see the machinations of a genetic manipulation laboratory, which draws on circus Indian elephant breeding stock to create an altered embryo. (You will learn more than you wanted to know about such intimate procedures.) Elephant babies take time to grow, and during these months, the young elephant trainer from Burma becomes convinced that his charge may be going to deliver a sacred elephant baby. He wishes to free her when she arrives, from experimentation and unscrupulous ownership, but the foreign investors from Asia will not be easily fooled.

To say more would be to spoil a riveting adventure, but I'll praise the character delineation which gives us young Kaung who is fiercely protective of his elefant, dropout Fritz Schoch who wants to forget his former life (and just might do that by caring for a pet), and stubborn veterinarian Valerie Sommer, who seeks to atone for her game-hunting father. Not to mention the glowing pink mini ELEFANT herself, Saba.

Swiss author Martin Suter, who has written for European newspapers, has looked thoughtfully into the matter of elephant reproduction, genetic manipulation, and altered gene creature ownership. He invites us to question whether we should play creator with living animals, who should own them, and why we should alter gene structure and expression. We also come to respect working elephants of various kinds and understand that they need forested sanctuaries. This is an unusual, amazing, and fun book. Great for adults who like to read speculative fiction.

When homeless alcoholic Schoch sees a glowing pink elephant in his cave, he decides it’s time to stop drinking. When he wakes up, the elephant is still there. Seeking help from a local vet, Valerie, Schoch becomes the little elephant’s carer and protector, hiding her from genetic engineering scientists who are only interested in profit and don’t give a damn about her welfare.

This book was totally not what I was expecting. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. There were some elements of this story that I really enjoyed: the relationship between Schoch and Valerie was very organic and lovely, and I also really liked following the story from the perspective of a homeless man. It was very interesting.

However, chunks of the book were made up of lengthy descriptions of elephant care and genetic modification, and were quite boring. I found myself skim-reading a lot.

Overall, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the story or the writing, but if you chose to pass on this book, you wouldn’t be missing much.

[3.5] A light read narrated in a tone similar to <i>The Hundred Year Old Man</i> and <i>A Man Called Ove</i>. The first protagonist on the scene, Schoch, a middle-aged alcoholic homeless in Zurich, is from the same curmudgeonly stable of characters, who, in their real life incarnations, might not be so likeable - but are made sympathetic, and sometimes endearingly comic, by that children's-book-for-adults authorial voice.

As is typical with novels like these, <i>Elefant</i> takes the reader on a caper through various locations, situations and occupations many people have hardly ever thought about - although here several of them have to do with elephants and/or genetic engineering. (I don't think I've read such detail about the collection of semen from domesticated animals for artificial insemination purposes since James Herriot books - but here the tone isn't laugh-out-loud awkwardness; now, it's decades later and a different species. A matter-of-fact clinical tone subtly communicates a sense of it and other artificial reproduction procedures as demeaning and tragic for the animals.) Seriousness is generally offset soon enough, though, by likeable or picaresque characters, or the outright endearing. (I've had to watch videos of baby elephants to try and see some of the cutest behaviours described - I particularly like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyCnzimVZtE">this one</a>.) And there are bumbling chases and stakeouts that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s British farce. Perhaps the cosiest, most escapist aspect of the novel is in the first two thirds, where several chapters evoke the joy of living alone in a big comfortable house with a sociable pet, and reading a lot. These are scenes to revel in and to curl up in. A nice detail was that we don't get lovely descriptions of snow scenes in winter - I wondered where they were in December chapters, as I'd been looking forward to them - but using that old friend of the Eng Lit student, pathetic fallacy, 'unnatural' out-of-season blizzards, and the longed-for Christmas-card scenery, arrive in late May.

There are underlying values in the book which to some, probably seem so normal as not to be noticeable, especially to Continental Western Europeans in late middle age and older. (The author is 70, and <i>Elefant</i> was first published last year.) Some of these will, and some won't, go down well with others... Refugees are basically good and should be helped, especially if they are nice people and share the values of your country (the just-post-Second World War generation taking this as more of a given than many younger centrists and conservatives); genetic engineering feels wrong and unnatural on a gut level and could have worrying repercussions; there's something satisfying about formerly well-off people who fell on hard times getting restored to their (rightful?) station; and China is supplanting America as a certain kind of antagonist: a big unethical corporate threat that's increasingly over here (also makes a work more saleable to Americans...). Very EU values, especially if considering the EU as neoliberal - although it's actually a Swiss-German novel. The prevalence of wealth in the culture - especially later in the book - is very Swiss, and especially very Zurich, as I understand from my GR friend Warwick, who lives there. Homelessness is apparently not visible as it is in UK cities. With the range of centres and soup kitchens available to Schoch and his comrades through the day, it's perhaps evident why. It's a level of service that suggests Swiss cities may be among the easier places in the world to be street homeless, better at any rate than contemporary Britain, especially as this provision is combined with a basic benefit rate of 986 CHF per month for a homeless person, equivalent at current exchange rates to slightly more than 10 weeks' worth of UK Jobseeker's Allowance (although Suter doesn't give details of the criteria).

Homelessness, alongside genetic engineering and elephant behaviour, are subjects on which Suter has done his research, including with people who have first-hand knowledge, as the acknowledgements explain. It's a shame that a few clangers, mostly, but not all, on other topics, remain in this edition. It doesn't tally with a vet's scientific knowledge that his biggest fear about genetic engineering would be infectious diseases that targeted specific human racial groups. Did that really get past the geneticists who read the manuscript? Or was that included later or despite them? How are all these vets moving into exotics practice from other specialties with such ease? Is it less of a big deal in some countries than in the UK? Did no-one at all try to correct a character's saying that not eating meat helped save the ozone layer?? (Rather that reduce carbon emissions or climate change.) Someone with opinions on animals as strong as hers these days seems likely to be vegan, not only vegetarian - but that would have meant that Suter wouldn't have had the opportunity to write about so many traditional Swiss dishes containing cheese. Why does an intelligent Burmese man who's been living in Switzerland for about 20 years still have such poor English? (The answer does seem too likely to be stereotyping.) And why would he name an elephant in Hindi when he talks to the animals in Burmese?

For me, these points didn't impinge too much on the narrative as a whole - <i>Elefant</i> is decent light / comfort reading and frequently made me smile - and I don't, in any case, expect popular fiction to be flawless. (It's an unexpected surprise if it doesn't have any errors, stereotypes or plot-holes.) I keep wavering between rounding down to 3 stars (which wouldn't reflect how much I enjoyed stretches of the book, on a scale with my other ratings) and 4 stars (which I feel a bit guilty about, because of the stereotyping of Kaung, and the way the wheels of the plot are oiled by the 'goodies' turning out to have connections and lots of money. Although the latter, especially from a UK/US perspective, also just reflects hard facts of life in which private charity is becoming increasingly important as state provision declines - having the authorities sort everything out, as happens in plotlines of some Nordic works, seems ever more distant and utopian.)

The novel also left me impressed with the versatility of translator Jamie Bulloch - the other of his translations I've read was the tense German modern classic <i>The Mussel Feast</i>, which has a markedly different style. It was great reading a translation into British English, as so many UK publishers commission or reprint American ones these days.

<i>Elefant</i> won't appeal to everyone on my Goodreads friends list: it hasn't got a lot to offer readers who only go for the highly literary or experimental, and others may think its political underpinnings leave something to be desired. But, although whimsical, it thankfully isn't as cheesy as the current UK cover's tagline suggests, and if you like the Jonasson type of caper novel for an occasional break , or just because, it may be worth a look.

A very unusual book, translated from, and set in Germany. A scientist discovers that by cloning some DNA, he can produce a very small, and luminous pink elephant. He discovers that he needs to inject the cloned material into a real elephant, so he chooses a circus which has several female elephants.
What follows is a hunt for the little elephant, who has been born, and cared for by one of the scientist, but he drowns before he can properly care for him, leaving him in a cave by the side of a river, in the care of an alcoholic home less man. Realising that the elephant needs care,he takes it to the free animal clinic.
A Chinese cloning company finds out about the elephant, and wants it for its own research.
This is an unusual story, with lots of car chases, lots of villains, and the redemption of the homeless man. The characters are well drawn, and the plot, though fantastical, is believeable

An apposite story of the issues and challenges of genetic manipulation of embryos, just as the UK law permits such manipulation for Cystic Fibrosis. The thin edge whereby such 'surgery' may occur in the future, either for illnesses that are caused by faulty genes, or for traits that are, or are not, required - such as a pink glow-in-the-dark skin! (and as there may, or may not be, a malfunctioning gene for fat cells, could I have this surgery too please?)

Initially, I was not sure of this book and story, but I was gradually drawn in to finding out about the homeless and  their lives, and then the circus. And then there was the geneticist and the elephants.

In the end, you could say that this is a fable for scientists. Or you could call it sentimental, or even redemptive. for me, it was all of these things. This tiny elephant was born for a reason, and she impacted a number of lives to bring them what, you could argue, they deserved. For good or ill.

Nicely written, and a story I couldn't put down.

An alcoholic, homeless man (Schoch), wakes up to see a small pink, glow in the dark elephant in his sleeping place. He puts it down to the drink, and goes back to sleep. The thing is, it's still there when he wakes up. Schoch later discovers that the small pink elephant has been genetically engineered solely to make money, and those who created it couldn't care less about it's welfare. These people want their elephant back and will do anything to get it.
This is a story about the ethical treatment of animals (and of the way that the homeless are treated and regarded), friendship, and what people will do to save the vulnerable.
I really liked all of the characters in this book: Schocha homeless man who takes on the responsibility of caring for the elephant; Kuang the elephant trainer and 'oozie' (I've never heard of this term before), the vet who gives up her house and job to care for the elephant, Roux the immoral geneticist (now he was a rather amusing character at times!).
I liked the style of this - I think that may be partly from the translation process (it was originally written in German). It was a fast, easy and very entertaining read.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this book.

I was expecting an almost childlike book but was still intrigued to read this. It was anything but; homelessness, genetic engineering, unscrupulous scientists even. Perhaps a little far fetching?? Who knows what goes on behind closed doors in the world of genetic engineering. Believable, almost! A heart warming and interesting and thought provoking read with a few heart racing parts. Enjoyable and well worth reading.