Alexander Masters

Smart ass

It’s the way Caroline pisses onto the concrete during the lunch break that delights her work colleagues: in a steaming, splattery arc.

issue 15 January 2011

It’s the way Caroline pisses onto the concrete during the lunch break that delights her work colleagues: in a steaming, splattery arc.

It’s the way Caroline pisses onto the concrete during the lunch break that delights her work colleagues: in a steaming, splattery arc. ‘It seemed to them an eloquent demonstration of the fact that the rules they lived by did not apply to her.’

Caroline is a donkey. During the day she analyses policy documents, calculates premiums and nibbles the pot-plants. In the evening she trots home across the city, through the chaotic tides of traffic and confusion of construction sites, to her keeper, Mr Shaw, to play chess.

Delightful, unforgettable and splendidly peculiar, Cornelius Medvei’s second novel opens with a journalist receiving a thick parcel of typescript papers. Muddled up with shopping lists, sweet-wrappers and jottings about Audrey Hepburn, is Mr Shaw’s memoir of his passionate and platonic love for a donkey.

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