Scan barcode
A review by ursulagaylewin
All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal
1.0
in the worst way possible, the direction this book took was totally unexpected. with the inciting incident of the book being the author’s brutal murder of his own cats and their kittens, it is a master class in perhaps the shittiest literary genre there is: self-obsessed memoir filled with masturbatory self-loathing (despite simultaneously being self-important, and intermittent hints that very deep down, the author might actually, somehow, be convinced of his innocence and victimhood) ... and all this with nothing at all to show for a lifetime of wrongdoing. a ripoff of better books like “no longer human.”
reading 'all my cats' you become painfully aware that hrabal is mentally ill. to be honest, this does absolutely nothing to temper my disgust at the things i’ve read here, especially given that his problem with the cats in the first place (and therefore ALL resulting problems in the book) were so easily preventable. he could have neutered them, made an effort to give them away, or had them put down humanely by a vet, which he is clearly aware he has the option to do since his wife at one point asks him why he doesn't (to no answer). this is key: if there were truly no options left i might feel a little different. in all this i know that domestic cats are a menace to ecology, and that this has to be dealt with somehow. that seems to be a common defense of this book. but then what am i supposed to think when hrabal tells a boldfaced lie to his wife that he had "taken the kittens to Dr. Beník, who had administered chloroform," when really he went on to brutalise them? what is left to think but that he purposely chose the most inhumane option over literally anything else?
almost more unbearable to read is his lack of self-awareness. the narrative is padded with what i guess i am supposed to interpret as a genuine animal lover’s spiritual connection with every animal he comes across. yet after beating half a dozen cats to death for the first time, he writes, “that winter, what I had done felt to me like murder” – but wasn't it actually murder (not just 'like' murder)? am i to believe that this extreme cat lover values the lives of cats so little that rounding them up and beating them to death – even using a weapon, an axe, to finish them off – is still a far cry from murder? how? why would it be? his answer: “I beat her to death to help me forget those nights when she would walk around outside my cottage and wail, crying from the depths of her soul for help. And I did help her. I helped her reach the other side, the other side of things and people and animals. I helped her achieve her death.” i'd like to think this excerpt speaks for itself as to how delusional hrabal is.
i would have said this book started off nicely, with idyllic scenes of a glowing domestic life teeming with extremely loving pets. but even there something felt off. everything said about the cats is really about hrabal in some way – how much the cats loved and adored and revered him like their god, how guilty they made him feel, how they burdened him, how their lives were at his mercy – you get the sense that the power and authority he feels from having a dozen little lives being dependent on him for survival was mostly what he ‘got’ out of keeping them. he imagines what one of his cats would say to him if he could speak: “I’d have crawled into [a] sack on my own, and you’d have beaten me to death as you beat those newborn kittens to death, and I’d have accepted that from you, Mr. Hrabal, because I loved you.”
even if i could put this all aside to give an unemotional review, this prose is genuinely unimpressive. i can recall exactly two paragraphs in the whole text that i thought were poignant. the rest is just hrabal's extremely repetitive fetishization of his own guilt being drawn out for 100-something pages of purple prose. and for how much he leans into trying to make this prose philosophical, it is seriously lacking in substance.
so, the closest i found to some sort of revelation within hrabal to answer for all this garbage is this (and this is also happens to be a good example of his rambling, repetitive style): “in the end I came to the conclusion that one cannot even kill a cat, let alone a person, with impunity, nor can one with impunity expel a person, let alone drive away a cat, without consequences.” …that’s it? is this supposed to be groundbreaking? the fact that brutally ending a life, any life, for no reason, will induce guilt of some sort? is this what i read the book for? because it definitely wasn't worth it.
reading 'all my cats' you become painfully aware that hrabal is mentally ill. to be honest, this does absolutely nothing to temper my disgust at the things i’ve read here, especially given that his problem with the cats in the first place (and therefore ALL resulting problems in the book) were so easily preventable. he could have neutered them, made an effort to give them away, or had them put down humanely by a vet, which he is clearly aware he has the option to do since his wife at one point asks him why he doesn't (to no answer). this is key: if there were truly no options left i might feel a little different. in all this i know that domestic cats are a menace to ecology, and that this has to be dealt with somehow. that seems to be a common defense of this book. but then what am i supposed to think when hrabal tells a boldfaced lie to his wife that he had "taken the kittens to Dr. Beník, who had administered chloroform," when really he went on to brutalise them? what is left to think but that he purposely chose the most inhumane option over literally anything else?
almost more unbearable to read is his lack of self-awareness. the narrative is padded with what i guess i am supposed to interpret as a genuine animal lover’s spiritual connection with every animal he comes across. yet after beating half a dozen cats to death for the first time, he writes, “that winter, what I had done felt to me like murder” – but wasn't it actually murder (not just 'like' murder)? am i to believe that this extreme cat lover values the lives of cats so little that rounding them up and beating them to death – even using a weapon, an axe, to finish them off – is still a far cry from murder? how? why would it be? his answer: “I beat her to death to help me forget those nights when she would walk around outside my cottage and wail, crying from the depths of her soul for help. And I did help her. I helped her reach the other side, the other side of things and people and animals. I helped her achieve her death.” i'd like to think this excerpt speaks for itself as to how delusional hrabal is.
i would have said this book started off nicely, with idyllic scenes of a glowing domestic life teeming with extremely loving pets. but even there something felt off. everything said about the cats is really about hrabal in some way – how much the cats loved and adored and revered him like their god, how guilty they made him feel, how they burdened him, how their lives were at his mercy – you get the sense that the power and authority he feels from having a dozen little lives being dependent on him for survival was mostly what he ‘got’ out of keeping them. he imagines what one of his cats would say to him if he could speak: “I’d have crawled into [a] sack on my own, and you’d have beaten me to death as you beat those newborn kittens to death, and I’d have accepted that from you, Mr. Hrabal, because I loved you.”
even if i could put this all aside to give an unemotional review, this prose is genuinely unimpressive. i can recall exactly two paragraphs in the whole text that i thought were poignant. the rest is just hrabal's extremely repetitive fetishization of his own guilt being drawn out for 100-something pages of purple prose. and for how much he leans into trying to make this prose philosophical, it is seriously lacking in substance.
so, the closest i found to some sort of revelation within hrabal to answer for all this garbage is this (and this is also happens to be a good example of his rambling, repetitive style): “in the end I came to the conclusion that one cannot even kill a cat, let alone a person, with impunity, nor can one with impunity expel a person, let alone drive away a cat, without consequences.” …that’s it? is this supposed to be groundbreaking? the fact that brutally ending a life, any life, for no reason, will induce guilt of some sort? is this what i read the book for? because it definitely wasn't worth it.