Title:: [[Decima]] Authors:: [[Eben Venter]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2025-08-22]] Instagram :: ## Editions - Edition:: [[Penguin Books]], South Africa, 2023 - Original Copyright:: 2023 - Pages:: 178 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9781415211274 ## Annotations Decima shape-shifts between memoir and ecological fiction, history and wonder, between the intimate consciousness of a black rhinoceros and the global machinery of extinction. It’s a story about rhino poaching in Venter’s home country, South Africa. He writes with awe about these magnificent animals and deep frustration about the circumstances that have brought them to the brink of extinction. While Decima has clear heroes and villains, Venter frames the problem as fundamentally systemic—local economic pressures that drive poaching are fueled by demand for rhinoceros horns halfway around the world, where traditional Chinese medicine serves patients willing to pay large sums for what amounts to a placebo. The novel takes its name from one of its narrators, Decima, a black rhinoceros living in a preserve. She and the other rhinos exist within a precarious system involving the state and wardens who struggle against the desperate choices people make when they’ve exhausted all other options. Through Venter’s prose, we see Decima’s will and right to exist as intractable as the forces conspiring against her. What I took from Venter’s wonderful novel is the profound awareness that all living things, beyond our categories and classifications, share an intimate understanding of the pressures of simply being in this world. I think everyone should read Decima, but it will require broader publication outside of South Africa. Someone make this happen! (Available as an e-book while we wait for global publication).  Also, love the Dürer cover.