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A review by mafiabadgers
Felidae by Akif Pirinçci
dark
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
First read 11/2024
At the start of this book, our first-person feline narrator is a bit of a sour puss. His owner has moved house, and he's not happy. It's not very enjoyable, and I was tempted to toss it aside, but due to a frankly snobbish disdain for people who don't give books a fair chance (whatever that might mean), I persevered. And I'm glad I did! It was much better than I'd expected, blending a bleak noir sensibility with over-the-top Gothic atmosphere, featuring mad scientists, feline cults of self-electrocution, catacombs filled with dessicated corpses, and so forth. All that good stuff.
The prose has a slightly fractured quality that often comes from translators who are more concerned with fidelity to the source text than creating a flowing piece of literature, but in this case it works very nicely—the roughness can be understood within the noir tradition of detectives whose sanity has been ground down by constant abrasive contact with the hard stuff of reality. In fact, it's possible to read the whole book as being about madness: individual, collective, scientific...
Less favourable elements of the noir tradition are also on display. The text revolves almost entirely around male characters, and female characters show up, and then either die tragically, have sex with the narrator, or impart some useful information to him and are never mentioned again. All are beautiful. One manages to buck the trend by dying before she shows up. One is blind; apparently her beauty makes her blindness all the more tragic. One is too young to be sexually eligible, but rest assured she's going to be very attractive when she grows up. I thought this kind of lecherousness was reserved for human characters, but it seems there are no depths to which the horny author will not sink.
Politically, it's a strange beast: the villains of this book are eugenicists, and the book is highly critical of their eugenics due to the high degree of violence used to pursue such aims. While I don't think this was particularly intentional, it does frame things in such a way as to suggest that there are such things as discrete races, and that eugenics would in fact work if only we could stomach the violence (or find a way to practice an informed, consensual eugenics), neither of which are true. I would have preferred to see it reckon with the violence that is inherent to the denial of choice that is always part of eugenicist projects, rather than saying that these particular eugenicists were bad because they were killers. The narrative's refusal to depict female characters as anything more than sex objects takes on a particularly disturbing cast when viewed in this light. But despite its ineptitude, the book's heart appears to be in the right place, and it has a very heartfelt critique of those who turn a blind eye to years of atrocities but pretend to be, or convince themselves they are, shocked when they find out. It's difficult not to make a post-Holocaust Germany connection.
Which is curious, because twenty-five years after Felidae was published, Pirinçci had done a complete about-face, going so far as to say that "I don't give a flying fuck if people call me a Nazi, I don't give a damn" (translation from his Wikipedia page). Perhaps there is something to be said for youthful idealism, after all—although Rita Mae Brown, who published a cat-narrated murder mystery of her own, Wish You Were Here (1990, only a year after Felidae came out), has remained a committed feminist and homosexual activist her whole life. Make of that what you will.
In other literary connections, one reviewer described it as Warrior Cats "on crack", but if I were going to make a childhood favourite comparison I think I'd have to go with Varjak Paw (2003), with its Gothic cityscape, turf wars, sinister disappearances, and critiques of high-minded pedigree. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Felidae was an influence. If it has a literary progenitor, though, I think it would be The Wind in the Willows; not because they have a similar tone, but because I think Pirinçci may have been trying to get as far away from the cheerful visions of nature and unquestioning bonds of friendship as he could. (Despite Felidae's cynicism, it nonetheless ends with the insistence that "Whether good or evil, we are all animals in the end, and should relate to one another in loving friendship." Oh, how the mighty have fallen. If this seems a bit too on the nose to make for a satisfying ending (speaking in strictly literary terms), it's because the end of the book is just as tiresome as the beginning. Despite the villain mocking the tendency of villains to waffle on about their plans to the hero before they fight, the villain does indeed waffle on about his plans to the hero before they fight. It's tiresome. And the concluding lines are frankly twee, which stands in strange contrast to the rest of it. But aside from the opening and closing pages, I really quite enjoyed it. Just don't give the author any money.
At the start of this book, our first-person feline narrator is a bit of a sour puss. His owner has moved house, and he's not happy. It's not very enjoyable, and I was tempted to toss it aside, but due to a frankly snobbish disdain for people who don't give books a fair chance (whatever that might mean), I persevered. And I'm glad I did! It was much better than I'd expected, blending a bleak noir sensibility with over-the-top Gothic atmosphere, featuring mad scientists, feline cults of self-electrocution, catacombs filled with dessicated corpses, and so forth. All that good stuff.
The prose has a slightly fractured quality that often comes from translators who are more concerned with fidelity to the source text than creating a flowing piece of literature, but in this case it works very nicely—the roughness can be understood within the noir tradition of detectives whose sanity has been ground down by constant abrasive contact with the hard stuff of reality. In fact, it's possible to read the whole book as being about madness: individual, collective, scientific...
Less favourable elements of the noir tradition are also on display. The text revolves almost entirely around male characters, and female characters show up, and then either die tragically, have sex with the narrator, or impart some useful information to him and are never mentioned again. All are beautiful. One manages to buck the trend by dying before she shows up. One is blind; apparently her beauty makes her blindness all the more tragic. One is too young to be sexually eligible, but rest assured she's going to be very attractive when she grows up. I thought this kind of lecherousness was reserved for human characters, but it seems there are no depths to which the horny author will not sink.
Politically, it's a strange beast: the villains of this book are eugenicists, and the book is highly critical of their eugenics due to the high degree of violence used to pursue such aims. While I don't think this was particularly intentional, it does frame things in such a way as to suggest that there are such things as discrete races, and that eugenics would in fact work if only we could stomach the violence (or find a way to practice an informed, consensual eugenics), neither of which are true. I would have preferred to see it reckon with the violence that is inherent to the denial of choice that is always part of eugenicist projects, rather than saying that these particular eugenicists were bad because they were killers. The narrative's refusal to depict female characters as anything more than sex objects takes on a particularly disturbing cast when viewed in this light. But despite its ineptitude, the book's heart appears to be in the right place, and it has a very heartfelt critique of those who turn a blind eye to years of atrocities but pretend to be, or convince themselves they are, shocked when they find out. It's difficult not to make a post-Holocaust Germany connection.
Which is curious, because twenty-five years after Felidae was published, Pirinçci had done a complete about-face, going so far as to say that "I don't give a flying fuck if people call me a Nazi, I don't give a damn" (translation from his Wikipedia page). Perhaps there is something to be said for youthful idealism, after all—although Rita Mae Brown, who published a cat-narrated murder mystery of her own, Wish You Were Here (1990, only a year after Felidae came out), has remained a committed feminist and homosexual activist her whole life. Make of that what you will.
In other literary connections, one reviewer described it as Warrior Cats "on crack", but if I were going to make a childhood favourite comparison I think I'd have to go with Varjak Paw (2003), with its Gothic cityscape, turf wars, sinister disappearances, and critiques of high-minded pedigree. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Felidae was an influence. If it has a literary progenitor, though, I think it would be The Wind in the Willows; not because they have a similar tone, but because I think Pirinçci may have been trying to get as far away from the cheerful visions of nature and unquestioning bonds of friendship as he could. (Despite Felidae's cynicism, it nonetheless ends with the insistence that "Whether good or evil, we are all animals in the end, and should relate to one another in loving friendship." Oh, how the mighty have fallen. If this seems a bit too on the nose to make for a satisfying ending (speaking in strictly literary terms), it's because the end of the book is just as tiresome as the beginning. Despite the villain mocking the tendency of villains to waffle on about their plans to the hero before they fight, the villain does indeed waffle on about his plans to the hero before they fight. It's tiresome. And the concluding lines are frankly twee, which stands in strange contrast to the rest of it. But aside from the opening and closing pages, I really quite enjoyed it. Just don't give the author any money.