Living matter takes many forms: it can be tiny like a tardigrade or giant and centennial like the tortoises of the Galapagos Islands and the ferns of the Oaxacan mountains; sometimes it is majestic and solemn like the vultures of Acapulco and other times it is a little ridiculous, like all of us. This book opens portals to the universes around us and moves to the rhythm of Bach and reggaeton between environmental themes and political and religious ideologies, between meditations on death and the quirks of biology and pop culture.

With his characteristic mix of wit and passion, Jorge Comensal examines human society with the eyes of a zoologist and nature with the tenderness of a lover. In these essays and chronicles, mostly unpublished, he invites us to pay attention to the creatures – plants and scavengers, arthropods and sirenians, humans and karatekas – that inhabit the planet along with us, and to relearn the importance and pleasure of wonder, sympathy and self-irony.

 

“This book is a testimony to the love for condors and bees, blind eels and ferns. An ode to the wild world and the creatures that obsess us, and when I say ‘us’, I am also referring to you, and if you do not yet share our naturalist devotion it is because you have not heard it in the words of Jorge Comensal. Literature in its most fertile state, the kind that makes the jungle within us more luxuriant.” – Andrés Cota Hiriart

 

129 pages – Original language: Spanish/Mexico (Antílope, November 2024)