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the complete review - fiction

Bambi

by
Felix Salten

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : very nicely done (though also rather dark)

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The tale, which in English was thinly supported by its intrinsic interest; takes on, in' French, a sort of fabulous quality, so that the peaceful air of the novel is invested with extraneous charms, Aside, then, from the unavoidable graces and happinesses with which literate French can invest anything, the story is still a placid, somewhat dull little account of the many afternoons of a fawn." - Paul Horgan, Books Abroad
  
  
• "Felix Salten, in Bambi, takes you out of yourself. He has the gift of a tender, lucid style. His observation is next door to marvelous, and he invests the fruit of this observation with pure poetry. (...) Bambi, for instance, is a better book than Green Mansions, and that is praise of the highest." - John R. Chamberlain, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It’s a pretty brutal meditation on existence, serving as a kind of wild counterpart to Orwell’s domesticated animals on the Farm." - Bill McKibben, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The curious thing about this insistence on solitude is that nothing in the book makes it seem appealing. The chief trajectory of Bambi’s life is not from innocence to wisdom; it is from contentment and companionship (...) to isolation and bare-bones survival. Stranger still, this valorization of loneliness seems unrelated to the book’s second explicit moral, which concerns the relationship between human beings and other animals. (...) What are we to make of this muddy, many-minded story ? (...) Zipes is knowledgeable about his subject matter, but he is not a lucid thinker or a gifted writer (...), and the Chambers translation (...) is much the better one. (...) What makes it such a startling source for a beloved children’s classic is ultimately not its violence or its sadness but its bleakness." - Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
  
  
• "Far from being a children's story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show." - Donna Ferguson, The Observer
  
  
• "Bambi should be read independently of its author’s biography. In Damion Searls’s elegant translation it is possible to understand why contemporary readers as different as Heinrich Mann and Schnitzler had such praise for this coming-of-age story of a young roebuck. The novel combines a richly imagined animal world with the narrative trajectory of a Bildungsroman. (...) Vignettes of sylvan otherness, enhanced by the hunter-author’s descriptive powers, alternate with anthropomorphically charged scenes and episodes." - Leo A. Lensing, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Bambi is a seemingly almost universally-known title -- though it is the Walt Disney movie version from 1942 that most likely first comes to mind. at the mention The source-material, this novel by Felix Salten, has however also enjoyed great success and popularity from the time of its first publication, both in the original German and then Whittaker Chambers' 1928 translation. Many sanitized and Disneyfied editions have been published since, but 2022 has now seen the publication of two translation of the original text, by Jack Zipes (as The Original Bambi) and Damion Searls (the one under review here); published by Princeton University Press and in the New York Review Classics-series respectively, these two translations are, in their presentation, also clearly geared more to an adult audience -- appropriately so, as Bambi is hardly *just* a children's book. Both serious and poetic, it is an impressive work of art that should hold great appeal to mature readers.
       Bambi is a tale of, as the subtitle has it: Life in the Forest, centered around the title-character, from his birth on. For the newborn everything is new and Salten uses the fawn's journey of discovery to also introduce the forest-world to readers. While not strictly realistic -- the animals converse with one another as humans might, including between species -- Salten gives a remarkably fine sense of animal-life in the wild. Even at its most fantastical -- a chapter consisting almost entirely of oak leaves in dialogue as winter comes -- the portrayal of nature rings true.
       At first Bambi is close only to his mother; later he befriends two cousins, Aunt Ena's children -- Faline and Gobo -- and they become playmates. Father-figures are almost entirely absent -- distant figures with crowns of antlers that are sometimes seen but don't stay with the fawns or their mothers. Looming largest among the wildlife is the wise old man of the forest, the Old Stag, who eventually takes Bambi at least partially under his wing.
       Bambi's mother tries to teach him about the dangers of life. She does not always explain why a certain situation is dangerous, or why something must be avoided -- but the greatest danger is obvious to all: 'Him'. Already Bambi's first encounter with Him makes clear to the fawn that this is something terrible: first there's the smell, and then:

     Bambi stares at the figure. It is strangely upright, strangely narrow, and has a pale face, utterly naked around the nose and the eyes. Dreadfully naked. The face radiates a fearsome horror. Cold terror. It has a monstrous, disturbing, paralyzing violence in it, and it is almost unbearably painful to look at, yet Bambi stands there and doesn't take his eyes off it.

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 October 2022

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Links:

• New York Review Books publicity page
• Princeton University Press publicity page
• Castelvecchi publicity page
• New Bambi Translation Reveals the Dark Origins of the Disney Story by Joanne O'Sullivan
• Not Meant for Children: Felix Salten and the story of Bambi by Jack Zipes
• The True Origins of 'Bambi' at Austria Info

• BrothersJudd.com*
• Chicago Review of Books
• Electric Literature*
• The Eyrie*
• Forbes*
• A Heavenly Home*
• Observer
• The Observer*
• Public Books*
• Publishers Weekly*
• Reading for Sanity Book Reviews*
• Shelf Awareness
• Tor.com*
• VoegelinView*

• Official site
• IMDb page

• See Index of German literature
• See Index of Children's and Young Adult fiction
• Other books from New York Review Books
• See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

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About the Author:

       Austrian author Felix Salten (born Siegmund Salzmann) lived 1869 to 1945.

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© 2022 the complete review

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