Jan 1, 2010

Axolotl | Characters

"Axolotl" opens with a blunt summary of its own plot: "There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl." An axolotl, the narrator later explains, is the larval stage of a type of salamander.

The rest of the story recounts how this fantastic transformation took place. The narrator, a man living in Paris, has grown bored with the lions and panthers he usually observes at the zoo, the Jardin des...