Here is a book that is elegant, good-humored, innocent, perverse,
poetic, funny, extravagant, preposterous, limpid, insouciant, and
philosophic. It has led readers to invoke comparisons to Hans
Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Cocteau, La Fontaine, Ronald
Firbank, Giraudoux, Julien Gracq, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Laurence Sterne,
Voltaire. In 1974, when it was published in France, it won for its
twenty-five-year-old author wide critical acclaim and the first
Prix de l'Insolite. In sum, a one-of-a-kind delight. In an imagined
Lithuania--a country less melancholy, less menacing than
Transylvania--where if it is not raining, it is probably snowing, a
very odd family resides in a Neo-Gothic chateau surrounded by an
overgrowth of trees, vines, and general miasmic verdure. We meet
grandfather Emeric, who spends his time collecting one thing or
another; Grandmother Casimira, who reads and embroiders; family
retainer Baba Sonine, who has something surprising under her
multifarious petticoats; the damsel Kinga, prone to migraines, and
her adolescent, myopic (everyone in this Lithuania is myopic)
brother, our narrator Max-Ulrich. Nothing much happens in their
lives. They take things as they come and are always cheerful...
Then appears the cat Damon! Gentle reader, not a demon but a
manifestation of the spirit the ancients supposed presided over the
actions of mankind and watched over their most secret intentions.
Incongruous and astonishing events ensue as the Great She-Cat grows
ever larger on her diet of vegetables and Continental desserts--a
diet possibly supplemented during her solitary twilight
strolls--children are said to have occasionally disappeared...
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