Standing at the monkey house in Jardin des Plantes, Kate Zambreno and her two-year-old daughter encounter an older woman who, though not an employee, leads them to the enclosure. Crowded by tourists’ flash photography, a newborn orangutan named Java nurses from her mother, Theodora. Zambreno mimes to her daughter—“milky”—in their shared language, and as they take in this special moment of connection with the captive primates, she also feels Theodora’s weariness, and wishes her privacy. The dailiness of the monkey house, she writes, is punctuated by events like these. When do we see ourselves most in zoo animals? During sharp moments like childbirth, or in the strange banality of the everyday?

In Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories (Transit Books; 184 pages), a collection of essays about captive animals, our (dis)connection to them, and Franz Kafka, form rivals content—both proving essential to readerly understanding. Woven into Zambreno’s experiences and reflections are the thinking of artists and critics such as John Berger, Francis Bacon, J.M. Coetzee, and Garry Winogrand. Yet rather than devoting pages to each new source, these external references appear and vanish, at times sentence by sentence, producing an immersive effect—leaving us to wonder as Zambreno wonders. Zambreno’s writing is at its strongest when she weaves first-person vignettes with her research, introducing strings of thought before letting them subside, allowing us to feel ourselves imagining alongside her.

The undefined gaze that permeates the book, both as a method of study and object of criticism, draws us in. There is a zoo gaze; there is a Kafka gaze. The question of where our gaze is focused, what it takes in and willfully shuts out, is integral to Animal Stories. “The zoo gaze is upon your child, watching your children seeing the animals, remembering yourself as a child,” she writes. Like the animals in their cages, these children, too, are not simply objects of one’s gaze. They inform and structure their parents’ experiences: During one visit, her daughter’s classmate informs Zambreno that all the sea lions in the enclosure are female. Why is this the case? Is this information, handed to us skeptically by Zambreno, even accurate? Is its accuracy important to the experience unfolding at the zoo? Zoo-going does seem to revolve, for Zambreno, around children. “Does anyone, above a certain age, actually like the zoo?” By asking this, Zambreno lets us continue her thought: What does it mean to like the zoo?

The Kafka gaze is similarly imagined. Zambreno studies Kafka from a century removed. That century in some ways mimics the glass between her and the captive animals. We turn immediately to Kafka’s physical description: “height: 5’11’’; weight: 134 pounds; nutritional status: ‘moderately weak,’ digestion and appetite surprisingly normal; an ‘even,’ ‘buttery yellow’ urine stream.” A Kafka gaze is born. Later, after Kafka’s journey to Paris is cut short by a skin condition involving pus-filled and bursting abscesses, Zambreno further develops this gaze. “At home in Prague, he must sit still in his plaster cast, which is unbearable, and he dreams at night of Paris traffic.” While the zoo animals’ minds were unknowable, Kafka’s is not, and Zambreno explores this mental territory through speculation. She shows us the enclosure: Niklasstraße 36, fourth floor, the young author crowded by his father and mother, his three sisters, his maid, and, of course, the chirping pet birds. Like the zoo gaze, however, the Kafka gaze is bifold: It is both Zambreno’s study of Kafka as well as her own attempts, once she’s steeped herself in his  journals and work, to try to view things in her life through his eyes. This gaze, though, seems less assured, more questioning, more inward-looking: “But am I trying to see a Kafka gaze where there is none?”

Since reading Animal Stories, I’ve been to the zoo, not being able to remember the last time I’d gone since childhood. Once there, I couldn’t shake Zambreno’s description of Jumbo the Elephant’s torturous life—living in captivity in the London Zoo before being sold to P.T. Barnum, his night terrors calmed by whiskey, his tusks ground down, his hide covered in sores. So I channeled my zoo gaze. At the giraffe enclosure, a small child stared from her stroller. I focused on her, wondering if she was experiencing the feelings of sadness and mortality I had long ago shut out. I looked out at the giraffes and tried to see their humanness, or my animal-ness, as Kafka might. “Don’t call them parables,” he said, referring to his anthropomorphic stories. “If anything, call them animal stories.”

Caio Driver is a writer from San Francisco. His writing has appeared in Witness, North American Review, and elsewhere.