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    The Dictionary of Animal Languages
    The Dictionary of Animal Languages
    The Dictionary of Animal Languages
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Dictionary of Animal Languages

    Written by Heidi Sopinka

    Narrated by Elizabeth Proud

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    We grant men a right to solitude. Why can't we do the same for women?

    Born into a wealthy family in northern England and sent to boarding school to be educated by nuns, Ivory Frame rebels. She escapes to inter-war Paris, where she finds herself through art, and falls in with the most brilliantly bohemian set: the surrealists.

    Torn between an intense love affair with a married Russian painter and her soaring ambition to create, Ivory's life is violently interrupted by the Second World War. She flees from Europe, leaving behind her friends, her art, and her love.

    Now over ninety, Ivory labours defiantly in the frozen north on her last, greatest work-a vast account of animal languages-alone except for her sharp research assistant, Skeet.

    And then unexpected news from the past arrives: this magnificently fervent, complex woman is told that she has a grandchild, despite never having had a child of her own . . .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 12, 2018
    ISBN9781684413959
    Author

    Heidi Sopinka

    Heidi Sopinka is the author of The Dictionary of Animal Languages, which was shortlisted for the Kobo Writing Emerging Writer Prize, and longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. A former environment columnist at The Globe and Mail, she is co-founder and co-designer at Horses Atelier. Her writing has won a national magazine award and has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, Brick, and Lit Hub, and has been anthologised in Art Essays. She lives in Toronto.

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    Reviews for The Dictionary of Animal Languages

    3/5

    42 ratings15 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I found this book to be interesting in concept, with each chapter named for an animal and weaving something about that animal into the narrative. Concept aside, the book did not hold my attention and I found myself putting it down often. The testament to this is that I have taken this long to review it. To other readers, I will say this: the concept is interesting; the writing is beautiful. Pick up The Dictionary of Animal Languages and decide for yourself if the story is engaging.
    • 3/5
      A special thank you to Edelweiss and Scribe for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.Ivory Frame is a world-renowned painter now in her nineties. Fiercely private, she is still devoted to her work. She has never been married, has no family, and no children. When a letter arrives to notify Ivory that she has a granddaughter who lives in New York, her life is turned upside down and her painful past collides with the life she's built for herself.Disowned by her bourgeois family, the young Ivory had gone to interwar Paris to study art. She discovered her calling with the avant-garde painters and poets who frequent the city's cafes and at the Zoological Gardens, the subject for her art. Ivory also found love in Russian painter, Lev.When the Second World War claims the life that Ivory has carved out for herself, she turns back to the project that she began in Paris—the dictionary of animal languages—which will consume the rest of her life. The dictionary is both scientific and artistic.Ivory fully withdraws into her work until one of Lev's paintings is discovered which is inscribed to her. It is now worth a fortune and it brings to light a secret from Ivory's time in Paris. Now in her nineties, she is forced to acknowledge what she has lost.I had the pleasure of attending an author event with Heidi and she is articulate, gracious, and truly lovely.Sopinka's novel is a slow burn with lyrical prose. She uses her words as a form of art in this solid debut about love, grief, and art. It is an emotionally charged novel that reflects a love of language with each beautifully written chapter named after an animal.The vehicle to uncover Ivory's past is the letter that arrives informing her that she has a granddaughter. This information is shocking given that she has never married, or has any family. The reader is then taken on a journey through Ivory's memories in times of art, war, and her yearning for Lev.The only thing I struggled with, and am unclear about, is why the choice to omit the quotations around the dialogue—this is a huge pet peeve of mine. I never understand why someone would willingly choose to confuse the reader. And who decides this? Is it the writer, or is it the editor? This is incredibly distracting and it detracted from what could have been an amazing story.
    • 3/5
      This book is for people who like writing that is a work of art rather than the telling of a story. Yes, it tells a story, but it is not the main point. The writing is the point - which isn't really my usual genre. I actually didn't finish this book. I got bored with it and skipped to the end. When I did, I felt I hadn't missed a thing. Sopinka does write beautifully. An example of how she writes, "You know this valley has been called the Playground of Kings, I say. The Garden of France. Which makes you think it should be those things, but all I see are these hot yellow fields of sunflowers that will soon be cut, gleaming and bristling like a big cat's pelt." Another thing that threw me off is that there are NO quotations to mark who is speaking when. It took me about 50 pages to get the rhythm of her writing and for it to not bother me. Her writing reminds me of Flannery O'Conner - you know, that one author they make you read in college, ask you to write notes in all the margins, and nod your head and make astute observations that you don't even get. This book is like that.
    • 3/5
      Oh my goodness, where do I begin???. This book is so disjointed and and confusing I cannot give it a thumbs up on any level. The missing "quotation" marks throughout totally left me the dark as to who the narrator was at the moment. UGH!. I've read other books that used this system, however this one is awful. The synopses of the novel that was included as printed material included as an early reviewer told me basically the whole story... why write more??? The only thing I found that I could follow was the narrative of Lev, when he recalls his capture, imprisonment and escape. I think that was three or four pages. This tale, if it is that, is too rambling and existential for me, not recommended. Sorely disappointed in what I thought would be an interesting read. The author should revert to poetry ... or at least a diary. Sorry, cannot recommend.
    • 1/5
      I will be honest I only got through the first quarter of this book. For me it was slow and confusing, I had to keep going back and re-reading. I want a book that grabs you from the fist page and holds you til the last and this was not that book. Not my cup of tea at all. I received this from LibraryThing Early Reviewers for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      Protagonist Ivory Frame is approaching the end of her life. Her life has been somewhat extraordinary- a wealthy family in England, nuns in Catholic boarding school, Surrealists in Paris, the horrors of World War II, and her final project cataloging the languages of all the world’s animals. At 90, she learns she has a grandchild - a grand mystery since she has never had a child. The outline of this story led me to this book, but I left disappointed. While the writing is pretty (poetic in fact) at times, is quite cumbersome at others. My biggest disappointment was the protagonist herself. I found Ivory to be selfish and whiny and found it hard to care what happened to her.
    • 2/5
      TOB 2019--This was my last TOB for the year. Although I didn't finish Milkman which I really disliked. This book was almost not understandable. It was overwritten. I'm tired of long sentences with obscure words that don't truly explain what the author is trying to get across. Unless the author is trying to be vague and mysterious.
    • 3/5
      Ivory Frame is an elderly woman who has been working for decades on The Dictionary of Animal Languages, a compendium of the various noises animals make to communicate, from the clicking of insects to bird songs to the howls of wolves. Ivory has had an eventful life, attending art school in Paris, where she falls in love with another artist until the Second Word War drives them apart. She finds her true calling with the dictionary, and even though she is in her nineties, she continues to work on it. This is an odd novel about a strong and determined woman. Heidi Sopinka tells the story from a very close first person, so much that there is no clear way to tell the difference between what Ivory is thinking and what she is saying aloud. The novel is set in two time frames; her life in France and her years after the war, as she finds her vocation. Sopinka's prose is not written with clarity in mind, there's a ornate and poetic feel to the writing that I found got in the way more than it gave greater illumination to the story. The best part of the novel was the character of Lev, a Tortured Artist with a truly fascinating and harrowing past in Ukraine and while he is the great love of Ivory's life, there are many hints that she's just the next girl in a sequence that exists somewhere below his art. There was a lot interesting going on and I wanted to like it more than I did. In the end, it was just too opaquely written and the central conflict shouldn't even exist, the solution being so obvious and predictable.
    • 4/5
      Lyrical, poetic prose. For lovers of literary fiction.
    • 4/5
      I received a copy of this book through a LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. My advice to readers is "give this book a chance." Other reviews have noted that it is not a "light" read, and that the author's approach to punctuation and frequent switches in time frame can be confusing. I read the first five or so pages over and over SEVERAL times before I felt as though I knew enough about who was "speaking" and what the context was to move on with the story. So, my first impression was "uh oh." BUT, if a reader is patient, and gives the book time to develop -- ah, what a wonderful read! You will have to pay attention... to the language, to the character development (like peeling layers away to get to know them), and to the changes from time/place to another, as the story switches about in Ivory's life. It is well worth the initial work of figuring out how to read this book. It is inventive, it is interesting, and it's an utterly new approach to a historical period we've all read about. We are experiencing it as the characters did -- in an intensely personal (and biased and blind) way. As if living through it, not as if it's an "historical" education. I recommend this book highly, unless you're looking for a boilerplate, quick, easy, "beach read" sort of book.
    • 5/5
      A novel loosely based on Leonora Carrington, after Sopinka was able to visit with her. I don't know much about Leonora Carrington but the descriptions of Ivory's art is most obvious like Leonora's. I don't usually like fiction based on real people, as the writer might take too many freedoms with a real person's story. But Ivory herself is an amazing character. She didn't need to be based on anyone else. Ivory will stay with you.The writing is gorgeous, refreshing, brilliant with wonderful observations on almost every page. You can tell when a character and writer appreciate the small things, but to them, are the big things. I do love a well written book that can appreciate nature. The book bounces around through times of Ivory's life, from when she is older studying animal language, Paris with the Surrealist artists when she has escaped the convent her parents sent her to, her time at home when she is younger and her only time for herself is riding her horse around the grounds. A couple tragedies make her recreate her life and turn from art, so she turns to her original safety, nature. Her dictionary of animal languages is a "protest against forgetting." To be honest, I was a little skeptical of this book not being pretentious... I thought the writer owned a clothing company... for horses (she doesn't). But luckily, I was proved wrong. This book is so full of love, friendship, nature, art, war and HEART. Every sentence proves Heidi Sopinka is a WRITER and I will read anything she writes in the future.Early on in the book, it was reminding me a bit of Jane Eyre, so I love seeing the writer herself mention the Bronte sisters. This book should be sandwiched between the Brontes and also the brilliant 'A Line Made By Walking' by Sara Baume for being so similarly about art and nature (and even for the chapters titled after animals), as well as China Mieville's 'The Last Days of New Paris' for being about the surrealist artists, or rather featuring their art in a very wacky way. Ivory would also get along very well with Patrica Westerford in 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers, if they both didn't love their solitude so much anyway. The book also reminded me of a Tarkovsky film... possibly Nostalghia. Like Tarkovsky, the plot here might be switching around all over the place, but it's all those lovely images and observations that matter.
    • 3/5
      The Dictionary of Animal Languages follows the story of Ivory Frame, an English artist in Paris shortly before WWI who lives through many tragedies and then remakes herself in America as a biologist who records visual representations of animal sounds. In her later years, she is told she has a granddaughter, even though Ivory is convinced that she doesn't have any children.I thought this book would revolve more around the mystery of how Ivory could have a granddaughter, which is clearly surprising to her, but this seems like a very secondary storyline. Instead, I was mostly just confused. The novel slips between periods of Ivory's life--her childhood, her early days in Paris, her life after her lover is taken away, and her years spent in America at school and working on her dictionary project. I did not find it easy to know when I was reading about. I had to rely on which characters were in her life at the time, and even that did not always help. I thought the mention of supporting characters so often would help them to become more relatable, but I found nearly all of them to be extremely flat. I did not feel particularly invested in any of them except Ivory. I was also confused by the author's choice to not use any quotation marks to delineate conversation, especially because their are times where it seems the character is talking, but then thinks better of it. I also did not understand the ending. It feels like there is no resolution, and this is frustrating to me as a reader.I would recommend this book to anyone who likes reading philosophical arguments in a literary guise, but this is not a light read.
    • 5/5
      Ivory Frame has always been a rebellious one. She refuses to be subdued by the nuns at the boarding school her wealthy English parents have sent her to. She finds her way to Paris where she meets surrealists. She has a passionate love affair with a married Russian painter and becomes an artist herself. World War II is at its peak in Paris. When tragedy strikes, Ivory leaves Paris and tries to rebuild her life. She has always had an affinity with animals and sets out to record animal languages. Now aged 90, she is still working on her dictionary of animal languages when she’s told that she has a grandchild, which stuns her since she has no children.This book deeply touched me in a way that few books have ever done. It was a very slow read for me as I wanted to savor each word. It’s poetic, it’s majestic and it’s absolutely stunning. I love how each chapter is entitled a different animal Ivory has studied and the way the author incorporates that animal and its characteristics into the chapter. Each chapter is a work of art in and of itself. Some of the chapters are short essays on life and love that are just gorgeous. The book is loosely based on the life of surrealist Leonora Carrington. The author spent several days with Ms. Carrington in her home in Mexico City and interviewed her for “The Believer”. As soon as I finished the book, I had to read up on this artist. There were some similarities between Leonora Carrington and Ivory Frame but also some quite significant differences.I’m saddened to see far too many negative reviews of this wonderful book. It’s true that it wouldn’t be for everyone and it isn’t a light read. There isn’t always a lot happening. But the author has a magnificent ability to get to the heart of her characters and brings Ivory’s world vividly to life in the mind of her readers. I hope this book receives the recognition it deserves in the literary world.This is a book that I will treasure and love and will read again. Most highly recommended.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      Although the title of Heidi Sopinka’s THE DICTIONARY OF ANIMAL LANGUAGES and its (loose?) basis on the life of artist Leonora Carrington are intriguing, this does not read well. That is, this is a confusing book.First of all, this would have been easier to read if Sopinka had used quotation marks. What is it with some authors nowadays and their elimination of quotation marks? They are an aid to the reader so she knows when thought ends and voice begins, so she understands the author’s intended meaning. When quotation marks are missing, the author has done a disservice to her reader.Also, this book has many sentence fragments, further instances of disservice to the reader. Again, subject and predicate, along with punctuation marks (besides the period), aid understanding. Although Sopinka doesn’t need to go back to school for a basic English grammar class--many of her paragraphs and sentences are constructed correctly--she seems to think the sentence fragment is a writing device that conveys meaning. I didn’t get much of it, so the device failed.Sopinka’s use of present tense, even in flashbacks, is also confusing.THE DICTIONARY OF ANIMAL LANGUAGES begins with Ivory Frame, 92-years-old, talking with Skeet. Although Sopinka does not say who he is, it seems that he is an old friend. I have read elsewhere exactly who he is, but Sopinka doesn’t say so. However, her use of present tense here is appropriate.Then flash back to past tense, then to present, then we are suddenly in another flashback where Sopinka still uses present tense, so the reader doesn’t know she’s in the past. Maybe she rereads the last few paragraphs to find an indication of when Frame left the conversation with Skeet and landed in Paris. It seems this is a much younger Frame, so this must be a flashback.Then the same thing happens in reverse. Now the reader is in the real present. Frame wants to tell Skeet about a letter she received informing her that she has a granddaughter. So that will probably make the reader further intrigued so she will want to read more. Or perhaps all the confusion, all the work the reader will have to trade for enjoyment, will deter her.I won this book through librarything.com.
    • 4/5
      Ivory Frame is a renowned artist. Now in her nineties, the famously reclusive painter remains devoted to her work. She has never married, never had a family, never had a child. So when a letter arrives disclosing that she has a granddaughter living in New York, her world is turned upside down and the past is brought painfully to life. Disowned by her bourgeois family, the young Ivory had gone to interwar Paris to study art, and quickly found her true home among the avant-garde painters and poets who crowd the city’s cafes. In fellow painter Tacita, she finds the sister she never had. In the Zoological Gardens, she finds a subject for her art capable of fascinating her endlessly. And in Lev, the brooding, haunted Russian emigre painter fleeing the Revolution and destined for greatness, she finds the love that will mark her life forever. But she loses all this, and more, when the Second World War sweeps away the life she has only just discovered. In her grief, she turns to the project she had begun in Paris, and which will consume the rest of her life: a dictionary of animal languages. Part science, part art, the dictionary strives to transcribe the wordless yearning of animals, the lonely and love-laden cries that expect no response. By nature solitary, Ivory withdraws fully into herself as she pursues her life’s work. Until the discovery of one of Lev’s paintings from 1940, inscribed to Ivory and now worth a fortune, brings to light a secret from her time in Paris that even Ivory could never guess. Now in her nineties, she is forced to acknowledge afresh all she has lost, and also to find meaning and beauty in a world defined by longing. Masterfully written, and emotionally charged, The Dictionary of Animal Languages is about love and grief and art and the realization that, like tragedy, the best things in life arrive out of the blue.MY THOUGHTS:The writing in this book is lyrical and flowing. Yes, it moves slow so don’t go in to it thinking because it’s a thin book, it’ll be a quick read. It’s not meant to be that. Do not rush through this book. Savor every moment for its intended, emotional tidal wave or thoughtful revelation.You are seeing this story through the eyes of a woman who is in her nineties who has suffered and been thrown away from her real family. She sought comfort in a less than noble man who took advantage of knowing her situation and her secret desires. He succeeded in creating more painful memories, ones Ivory chose to try and forget. If you read this book and are left feeling empty and hollow, then you’ve felt how Ivory felt and why the author wrote the story the way she had.I did find issues with the perspective jumping between past and present and felt it could have been handled better. I also would have loved fifty more pages that answered a few things or explained them better for me. The book was too short and several of the more poignant parts deserved better lead-ins since these were sections that seemed too blunt and irrelevant at times.For a first book, I think the author has something here and sure it won’t be for everyone. I doubt a younger crowd would enjoy it as much as those from my generation might. You really need to take your time to appreciate Ivory’s life savoring each glimpse into her past for what it is and not for what you would like to see it be. This character went through a long life with painful experiences and had tried to survive as best as she could until Lev came along with all his contradictions and pain to bring her down to a depth that no one should have to experience leaving her with regrets and pain.