All My Cats
All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal
FALL feels like as good a season as any to pay a visit this mordant 39-page volume of countryside memoir by subversive new wave writer and poet Bohumil Hrabal. Set in 1965, published in 1983, All My Cats is an icicle-cold, pre-Prague Spring's tale of shelter, isolation and the toll of caretaking in central Bohemia.
Hrabal was becoming a national literary figure in Czech Republic, with two successful novellas — 1964's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced Age and 1965's Closely Observed Trains — on shelves and bestseller lists.
Inspired by the political and social restrictions experienced by Hrabal while working along Czech railroads during the Second World War, Closely Observed Trains — adapted in 1966 into an Oscar-winning film by Jirí Menzel — was successful enough, in financial terms, that the once struggling poet could afford to purchase a small cottage in Kersko, about a 40-minute drive from Prague.
Almost as soon as Hrabal and his wife Eliška Plevová arrived in their white Renault 5, a hatchback they nicknamed Autícko, meaning "little car," several cats showed up. Their numbers climbed so high that Hrabal — who describes his love for the pets and his brutality toward them with startling specificity — must consider culling the population, which turns feral over its first winter.
"I would sometimes go to Kersko by car to tend to the cats, but only in good weather," he wrote. "And when I did take the car and caught myself driving a little too fast, I'd slow down, because if I were to have an accident, what would become of the cats?
"When the roads were icy or it was snowing or raining, I'd take the bus, because that way I was sure to arrive safely. Yet even when I took the bus and sat in the front row, I'd suddenly wonder: What if the bus crashed? Who would feed the cats? And I'd move to a seat in the middle rows and remain alert so that if something happened I could dive out of harm's way, because if anything happened to me, who would give milk to my cats?"
— Ben Waldman