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shimmer's review
5.0
There are few cities as layered with memory and metaphor and meanings both personal and historical as Paris, and Adam Biles' Grey Cats is a terrific mining of those many layers, an expedition of "punk-archaeology," as his narrator calls it. That narrator is an English writer living in France, in love with a Parisian named Melina, and the novel is his account of following her into the nightworld of a city and learning he doesn't know the place -- or the person -- as well as he thought, and that "there are as many cities as there are people who move through them." Grey Cats shows us Paris through lenses of romance and literature and psychogeography, among others: all the ways the "city of light" stands in the cultural imagination-at-large. The image that's stuck with me more firmly, perhaps, is this scene in a Metro station:
The novel itself is equally layered, offering so much to peel back and plumb that through the serendipity of taking a long time between making notes for this review and actually writing it I had a chance to realize how much Grey Cats had occupied my imagination, simmering away and leaving me even more impressed than my already quite positive first reaction. I had as much fun spotting nods to Raymond Queneau, La Jetée, the myth of Orpheus, and so much more, like wandering unfamiliar neighborhoods and half-catching details then filling in what I'd missed from my expectations; a bit of a dérivée through the book, I suppose. Or, perhaps, none of those other texts I connected it to are "in" the novel and I only brought those associations to it myself, creating the city I wanted as the characters do, out of my own prior notions and memories (real and imagined) of Paris.
There's an overlying -- literally -- image in Grey Cats of the city blanketed in ash from the Icelandic volcano that erupted few years ago, and without ever making that layer of the book heavy-handed Biles turns it into a powerful, constant reminder that Paris is always rising and re-rising from its own ashes, being built and rebuilt of the past as it decays and distorts in the streets as in our heads as we each make our own city the way we make our own book each time we read or reread a novel. I already know I'll be rereading Grey Cats to see what new cities and stories can be stirred up from its ashes, and I look forward to it the way we (at least, I) long to return to cities we've known as younger selves to measure their changes against our own.
A fan of old fly-posters arced from the wall. Age had mottled them, loosened the paste so they could be picked through like a giant Rolodex. The first was for pastis — a dandy in a canary-yellow suit, the waterlogged paper crinkling his smug face, pouring himself a glass of the emasculated absinthe: AH!… MOI JE BOIS UN RICARD. Melina flicked on through the fan. It was strange, a little disorienting too, to be travelling at once forwards and backwards in time. Each of these posters would have been displayed for a week or so, passed by, observed or ignored by hundreds, thousands of people -- many of them now long dead -- before being covered up by the next.
The novel itself is equally layered, offering so much to peel back and plumb that through the serendipity of taking a long time between making notes for this review and actually writing it I had a chance to realize how much Grey Cats had occupied my imagination, simmering away and leaving me even more impressed than my already quite positive first reaction. I had as much fun spotting nods to Raymond Queneau, La Jetée, the myth of Orpheus, and so much more, like wandering unfamiliar neighborhoods and half-catching details then filling in what I'd missed from my expectations; a bit of a dérivée through the book, I suppose. Or, perhaps, none of those other texts I connected it to are "in" the novel and I only brought those associations to it myself, creating the city I wanted as the characters do, out of my own prior notions and memories (real and imagined) of Paris.
There's an overlying -- literally -- image in Grey Cats of the city blanketed in ash from the Icelandic volcano that erupted few years ago, and without ever making that layer of the book heavy-handed Biles turns it into a powerful, constant reminder that Paris is always rising and re-rising from its own ashes, being built and rebuilt of the past as it decays and distorts in the streets as in our heads as we each make our own city the way we make our own book each time we read or reread a novel. I already know I'll be rereading Grey Cats to see what new cities and stories can be stirred up from its ashes, and I look forward to it the way we (at least, I) long to return to cities we've known as younger selves to measure their changes against our own.
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