Book Review: "Bambi" by Felix Salten

Bambi (1923)
Felix Salten (1869-1945)
293 pages

I recently received, as a gift for my children, a copy of the book Bambi, by the Austro-Hungarian author Felix Salten. Although I had only ever known the Disney movie version and associated story books, I wasn’t particularly surprised to learn that there lay behind it all an earlier novel.

And, as I began reading the story to them, the opening chapters proceeding much like I dimly remembered the movie, with the newborn Bambi’s wide-eyed wonder at the world of the forest, as he discovered it with his mother and other animal friends. I recalled that a dark turn lay waiting in the story – no spoiler here for those who might not be familiar – but it became clear that my kids were aware of it too, so I wasn’t too worried about its impact.

But already well before that climactic moment, Bambi finds the frolicking and enchantment of the forest giving way to starker realities. Deadly encounters with “Him” – a hunter – make concrete what had been for Bambi and his young friends the previously amorphous warnings of danger from their parents. And He is far from the only predator in the forest; Bambi comes to witness, and initially struggle to accept, animals hunting others, in quite graphic terms. Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw” indeed.

It gradually becomes clear, then, that in Bambi Salten wrote not a children’s book but a bildungsroman, one both tender and bracing. As Bambi grows up, he continues to discover new wonders in the forest, but also finds to his dismay his mother leaving him on his own for ever longer periods of time; with the changing of the seasons, he suffers through his first winter, with the constant struggle to find food a radical shift from the seemingly boundless bounty of the summer; and, the mysterious predators that hunt on two legs continue to plague him and the other animals of the forest. To help Bambi find his way, an elder stag, a Prince, repeatedly seeks him out to give him laconic chidings and advice, before just as abruptly disappearing and leaving him to ponder their meaning.

Having read translations of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in which the stories of Cinderella, Snow White and others were much darker, and often bloodier, than their Disney interpretations in which mild tension gives way to lived happily ever after, I perhaps should not have been surprised to encounter something similar in the case of Bambi. And, although it can be easy to write-off a story in which the animals talk as written for children, no one does so, for example, with George Orwell’s Animal Story. By giving voice to Bambi and other life in the forest, Salten has written an engaging coming-of-age story, heart-warming in its portrayal of the discovery of the beauty of the world, but also heart-rending in its recognition that with that beauty come harsh realities.

Salten crystalizes this enigmatic mystery of the cycle of life in perhaps the most poignant scene in the novel, one in which Bambi doesn’t actually make an appearance. In a brief chapter – a vignette really – as autumn deepens toward winter, two leaves in a great oak attempt to make sense of what is happening to them, having watched so many other leaves fall out of the tree. They wonder who’s next and what falling will mean, despairing of the unknown to come, until one attempts to cheer the other up:

Let’s remember how beautiful it was, how wonderful, when the sun came out and shone so warmly that we thought we’d burst with life. Do you remember? And the morning dew, and the mild and splendid nights… (109)

 

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Other notes and information:

Bonus review, from my daughter, including her drawing of Bambi:

BAMBI by Felix Salten

Characters:

Bambi is the protagonist

Him (man) is the antagonist

Faline (soulmate) and Gobo, siblings, friend hare and owl are some friends of the protagonist, Bambi.

Something that I liked about the story is it's very realistic to the circle of life.  Something that surprised me is the leaves speaking to each other.  it made me feel like some questions can't be answered.  I wrote that because the leaves wonder what will happen when they fall off their tree but that question will never be answered until they feel it for themselves.

It was gratifying to find that, without prompting on my part (she hadn't read my review yet, and I only kept telling her to write what she liked or didn't like about the story, or what stood out for her) she also was struck by that scene with the two leaves.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" by Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience:
A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
Edited by Ann Druyer
284 pages

In 1985, renowned astronomer and author Carl Sagan gave the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow; two decades later his wife, Ann Druyer, collected and edited the resulting transcripts, and published them as The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Noting in her Editors Introduction that in giving the lectures Sagan was “following in the footsteps of some of the greatest scientists and philosophers of the last hundred years – including James Frazer, Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Alfred North Whitehead, Albert Schweitzer, and Hannah Arendt,” she recalls that he viewed the series as an opportunity to “detail his understanding of the relationship between religion and science.” (xiii)

Sagan opens by evoking the awe that people have felt since ancient times when gazing up at the heavens. Augmenting his characteristically eloquent descriptions of the cosmos with gorgeous photographs and fascinating diagrams of both our Solar System and more distant wonders, he reveals the complexity and beauty in the structure of the universe, as well as its immense size and myriad wonders.

Turning to the theme of his lectures, he describes how advances in scientific understanding that challenged religious claims about the natural world have altered our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. He recalls in particular the revolution that began with Copernicus, overturning the concept of humankind as having a privileged position in the universe, shifting us from its center to a planet circling an average star, at the fringes of a galaxy that is one of trillions.

But, he argues, by the late 20th century this revolution had stalled in the face of the propagation of the concept of intelligent design – the claim that only an intelligent being could create something as complex as a human.

He pushes back against the arguments for intelligent design by noting the fundamental fallacy of the assumption that the complexity of human beings, or even bacteria for that matter, could not have arisen naturally, that it must needs have required a purposeful designer. Given the power of evolution when operating over immense timespans, he argues that rather than imagining humans – or bacteria – as suddenly appearing, fully formed, their current appearance must be recognized as the quite natural cumulative result of a vast series of tiny, incremental steps over many tens of millions of years.

Broadening the implications of evolutionary change, he explores how scientists’ growing understandings about the possibility of extraterrestrial life support the reanimation of the revolution de-emphasizing humankind’s privileged position in the universe.

In their search for life beyond Earth, scientists have discovered significant amounts of organic matter on various bodies in the Solar System, as well as beyond it. Coupled with an understanding of the power of evolution, it becomes natural to look out into the Milky Way galaxy and consider whether there are not other worlds with life.

In that vein, Sagan describes the Drake equation, the product of some half-dozen factors that when multiplied together given an estimate of the number of technologically advanced civilizations in our galaxy – those capable of radio astronomy and so of interstellar communication. (For a description of the equation, see my review linked to at right of astrophysicist Adam Frank’s Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.)  Though the values of several of the factors in Drake’s equation are quite uncertain, it has served, according to Sagan, as a basis around with scientists have pursued an answer to the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life. And, he notes, even just asking the question about life elsewhere has significant implications for religions centered on the idea that humankind occupies a unique place in the universe.

More generally, Sagan explores the ways in which the possibility of extraterrestrial life has impacted people’s thinking about both human history and our future. In a lecture titled Extraterrestrial Folklore, he describes the cottage industry that arose in the second half of the 20th century around supposed evidence of pre-historic visits by aliens, and the recurring reports of UFO sightings. Noting the emotional and psychological motivations that trigger the popular imagination about such theories and reports, he shines a scientific light on them, and, in the end, finds that they don’t stand up to thorough examination.

In a similar manner, Sagan explores the many and varied concepts of God, and more generally of religious experiences people report. Here, as throughout these lectures, he does not attempt to disprove such beliefs or experiences; he does not argue that a specific piece of scientific evidence – or lack thereof – means that a particular belief or experience is not true. Rather, he applies his scientific approach to understanding the world as a lens through which to examine religious belief and experience, and so to question whether they can make sense in such a light.

In The Varieties of Scientific Experience, as in his earlier work, Sagan presents an enthralling view of the cosmos, and an engaging and thought-provoking view of humankind’s place in it. Though he maintains a fairly light tone through most of the lectures, he concludes with a bracing, final talk in which he makes a plea for recognizing, and acting to avoid, what he refers to as crimes against creation, describing the dangers of nuclear war, environmental destruction and the petty disputes that lead nations to war. In a statement that recalls his famous quote about a photograph of Earth from Voyager 1 as it departed for the edges of our solar system, “a pale blue dot,” he writes: 

When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, [but] the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It’s like living on a lifeboat. We breathe the air that the Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question – in a certain sense the only question – is, will we? (210)

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf