Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons

by Peter Trachtenberg

From “a genuine American Dostoevsky” (The Washington Post): a dazzling, funny, bittersweet exploration of the mysteries of relationship, both human and animal.

When his favorite cat Biscuit goes missing, Peter Trachtenberg sets out to find her. The journey takes him 700 miles and many years into his past-- into the history of his relationships with cats and the history of his relationship with his wife F., who may herself be on the verge of disappearing. What ensues is a work that recalls travel narratives from The Incredible Journey to W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Trachtenberg ponders the mysteries of feline intelligence (why do cats score worse on some tests than pigeons?), the origins of their domestication, their terrible treatment during the Middle Ages. He also looks at the riddle of why any of us loves whom we love and all the unforeseen places to which that devotion leads us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cats, Memoir, Animals, Unfinished

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 9, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the memoir 7 TATTOOS, THE BOOK OF CALAMITIES: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little Brown, August 2008), and ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION (Da Capo, October 2012), a book about the search for a missing cat that's also an encoded exploration of love and marriage.

His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR'S "All Things Considered."

Trachtenberg is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

He's the recipient of a NYFA artist's fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Whiting Writers Fellowship, a 2010 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a 2012 residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. The Book of Calamities was given the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award "for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity."

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to find this book lyrical and profound; Trachtenberg is a wonderful writer, and the idea of using cats as both example of and figure for the force, mystery, and pain of love seems inspired to me. But the book itself seemed pretentious and pastiche-y to me (alluding to every intellectual touchstone from Derrida to Swann's Way); the insights into cat behavior and domestication banal; and the navel-gazing of telling the story of his vexed marriage seemed self-indulgent and pompous. Trachtenberg seems like a hipster impressed with his own wasted youth (snorting Ritalin with prep school friends), wide reading (did I mention he's read Proust? and Ruskin--gasp!), and wastrel creativity (he spends far more time describing his failures to sympathize with his wife's deep devotion to her cat than he does adumbrating how frustrating it must have been for her that he was going broke and getting them deeply into debt). I think the biggest problem with the book for me is this: while Trachtenberg wants the cat connection to be a po-mo metaphor indicating his own knowingness about the unknowability of another person, even another person to whom you are quite devoted, it's actually a totally familiar, even trite metaphor that treats femininity as felinity. In other words, Trachtenberg himself, the well-intentioned if often misbehaving male intellectual, is a totally knowable, sensitive, and engaging character, while his wife "F." is aloof, fickle, at once cold and surprisingly affectionate, thin and lithe, solitary and contemplative...wait a minute...by golly...does it sound like I'm describing a CAT?!?

So, once again, women become unknowable and almost unlovable cats, while men are the devoted and befuddled cat owners who just don't know what to make of them. Trachtenberg's extended meditations on husbandry (managing your household and your wife economically) and on the fall from Eden only emphasize these trying and tired gender dichotomies. I found myself really wishing these two would get divorced by the end of the book. "F." felt like a literary affectation instead of a living, breathing human being, and oddly, even Biscuit, the cat who precipitates the quest that is the ostensible occasion for writing the book, feels a little generic. Trachtenberg is much more engaging writing about his first cat (with a mean underbite and attitude) Bitey and his wife's sweet and sickly lost cat, Gattino. I honestly think I would have preferred this book if it had abandoned its philosophical and literary pretenses and allowed itself to be a cat memoir.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. Trachtenberg succeeds in combining his love of cats and his love of a woman, and the perils of all these relationships, and does it in a way that is not contrived. His history with cats, and of cats, is as vivid and compelling as his portrait of a failing marriage. The title says it all: "insane devotion." Make that plural. Love works in many ways. The book is also a travel memoir, as the author travels to Italy to retrieve an orphaned cat, as well as his wife, whose love for cats equals his. Quite a tale, a short story in itself, embedded within a compelling memoir.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable and meandering memoir about a lost cat -- but it's also about falling in love, getting married, and then falling out of love. And there are pleasant references to Proust and philosophers and history and art and poetry and trips to Italy...

I'd recommend this book first to anyone who loves cats, and second to anyone who likes thoughtful, rambling memoirs.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous book that you must read if you've ever loved an animal or a person. Yes, you.

[Carmen Rodrigues · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Trachtenberg journeys home to find his beloved cat Biscuit, he takes us on a separate, lyrical journey through crumbling homesteads and lost pets until we arrive at the heart of his story--a marriage that is as beautiful as it is unsteady. In this raw space, Trachtenberg’s memoir shines best, proving itself a brave exploration of attachment, commitment, and the vulnerable interactions that make us human.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read many memoirs. I enjoy the intimacy of sharing a space with someone as they think about their life, their thoughts; I'm interested in watching the writer's responses, observing how they approach memories . . . But I owe the author this: that it is not my place to judge her/him. It doesn't matter if I "like" the memoirist, and it is not my role to let them do all the work of revealing and thinking so that I can sit back and judge them. It's an exploration, not a trial. And yet . . . some writers make it difficult. Maybe it's the difference in the classic memoirs - the Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, Tobias Wolff, Primo Levi, Frank Conroy (I could go on and on) - and the sort of contemporary memoir often derided as "navel-gazing." They are different beasts. And maybe (I'm not sure), Peter Trachtenberg's memoir about his love for his cats and for his wife doesn't traverse the line from navel-gazing to that other art. I'm not sure, but I couldn't help but consider whether I liked this guy or really, really didn't care for him - and as I said I don't want to be in that role. But he repeatedly "pushed that button," particularly in his continual rumination on whether he loved his wife or not, whether he was capable of love, what love is - this was just weird and a a little creepy in a middle aged writer whose wife is a well-known writer. What did Mary G. think of this book and this portrayal of herself as "F." (read: feline)? I just felt I shouldn't have been reading these private observations and questions he was pondering. It was unseemly.

I recently read (listened) to Paul Auster's two recent memoirs, and while I definitely don't think they rise to the classic memoir pedestal and involve constant navel-gazing, Auster is so damned self-absorbed and confident in his project - he doesn't seem to care if the reader is with him or not - he's really only interested in himself. The difference is that Trachtenberg appears to be less confident and to care inordinately about how he is coming across. This may simply come down to different personalities, but the confidence and self-understanding one feels must come across on the page and in the tone of the book . . .

The artifice of this book made it somehow dubious, hard to take. Love of cat as metaphor for love of wife. A lot of masculine bullshit. (As if he felt a little emasculated by loving cats and had to prove his difference from women/cats). This even without reading the prefatory note in which he states that::

This is a work of nonfiction .... Still, the facts in this book vary in their density .... The book also contains an artifact, an incident or detail that originates solely in my imagination. I have included it for aesthetic reasons and out of curiosity about the nature of nonfiction and its tolerance for admixture or adulteration.

Okay, I don't have a problem with the acknowledgment that memoir is an admixture of "facts" and memories, but "the facts vary in their density" is rather bold, and I don't know what that means. For what it's worth, I have my guess about the artifact: (I think it's the abrupt reappearance of Biscuit at the end of the book, when the author arrives home to search for the missing cat and looks down and there is the cat next to him. It's too perfect, a deus ex machina almost - my cat loves only me. Followed only by the anticlimactic casual add-on that Biscuit had probably been hanging out in his "second-home" all along.
I give this three stars because some of the writing is lovely and thoughtful. Although I didn't appreciate the position the book seemed to place me in, I did enjoy his stories about his cats.

[Victoria · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really, really didn't like it.
This was my first by him & I hope my last.
Not enough abt cats & too much general whining.
Don't like his writing style, it was slow going,not easy to read, and I don't mean b/c of vocab. Just obstreperous.

[Jenna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd give this about a 2.5, somewhere between "it was okay" and "I liked it."

First the good: the story of Biscuit was compelling, and I read, or at least skimmed, until the end because I wanted to know what happened. I was also struck by the disappearance of Gattino, and find myself still thinking about him even after I've finished the book. I learned a lot of random but interesting facts about cats. As a cat lover, I found the history of feline domestication, the science of cat vocalizations, and the anecdotes about the author's cats to be very interesting and memorable.

What I disliked: I found the writing to be too pretentious a lot of the time and only skimmed through parts of it. The interwoven memories were often compelling, but I found the book too hard to follow at times. I didn't need it to be chronological, but would have liked more clues at the beginning of each section to know what time period he was talking about. Some parts were too repetitive, and the work as a whole could have used another round of editing.

Not a bad book at all. If you've ever had a cat you truly loved, you'd probably appreciate at least that aspect of the story. It probably says more about me than the book when I say that I would have preferred much more about the cats and less of the author's personal meditations on his life.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book isn't for everyone- only for people who enjoy words, who ponder how seemingly disparate pieces of life fit together, and who listen to the honest, sometimes ugly, truth of life and appreciate it. This is a book for realists. While so much of it is about cats, if you come away thinking this is a book about cats you've missed the point. Ironically, one of the most honestly human books I've read.

All of that gushing done, I do wish that more of the life narrative was shown; more actual conversations to understand Peter and F's relationship, more of an arch in their relationship development. It left me wondering if he ever really knew her or loved her, but he may have been asking himself the same question.

Peter would be happy to know that since reading this I have been nicer to my cat.

[l · Rating 2 out of 5]

great stylist, bad novelist, douchebag of a person.

There were some lovely passages wherein he describes his cats but this whole 'women as cats' metaphor is frankly idiotic and stretched to absurdity.

On a semi-unrelated note, I really can't stand people who let their cats outdoors in the city because it's 'natural' - do people really believe cats are smart enough to understand the dangers of a modern city? Or that they're able to navigate through an epidemic of feral cats without catching anything? Why would you risk that? Dumb as fuck.

[Florence Buchholz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author is so worried about his missing cat that he travels from North Carolina where he is working to New York to search for her. (The cat sitter has reported that she is missing.) As filler he writes of his relationship with his wife, religion, philosophy, history, sex, and anything that piques his interest. He writes of his personal relationships with a curious blend of intimacy and detachment which is quite engaging. Like all true cat lovers, this guy is slightly neurotic.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This personal memoir isn't really about cats. It's about a man who has cats. He writes about his ex-girlfriends and wife, referred to by initials instead of name. The observations are clever, but I have no interest in the love life of an irresponsible guy who loses his cats.

http://catoverlord.blogspot.com/2013/...

[Stephanie A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring, pretentious navel-gazing, using the losing and finding of a pet as a weak framing device. A few interesting anecdotes about his cats smothered under the weight of his failed and failing relationships, sidebar history lessons, and way too many tangents about or references to sex. Barely worth of being shelved in the pet section.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to laugh and cry in equal parts while reading... This is a book about love, life and cats. Each is displayed in its own flawed perfection. As the way most people either love or hate cats, I suspect you will either love or hate this book, and very little I will say will change that...

[Maegan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, guy. You started out really well, but went way too far into contemplating your navel and frankly, you're not any more interesting than I am.

Aside from that, I'm glad your cat came home.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peter Trachtenberg is a very good writer. In his ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION, every paragraph is beautiful. But it meanders.

Trachtenberg writes in first person about, mostly, his cat Biscuit and his wife, F. He and F. have had and still have more than one cat, and Trachtenberg tells us about more than one cat. And he tells us about more than the cats.

Here’s the structure of this book as I see it: Biscuit is missing. Trachtenberg is out of state and has left his cats in the care of an irresponsible pet sitter. In between paragraphs about this dilemma, Trachtenberg inserts paragraphs about his wife, his other cats, and many other reminisces, reflections, and ruminations.

It was too much for me. But I finished ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION to learn the fate of Biscuit.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Veered into the maudlin when discussing his human relationships, and I agree with another reviewer who said the lack of a recognizable timeline made it tricky to identify when things were happening, but even so, when Trachtenberg writes about cats, his stories are genuinely moving. In summary, moar cats, less human drama.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in awe of Peter Trachtenberg's writing: his elegant prose, poignant storytelling, and easy erudition. I don't say this because he's a friend and colleague. He's just damned good. His writing never feels like "research," reportage, or quoting and name-dropping for the sake of gravitas or the appearance of authority. If he talks about Nietzsche or Proust or Aretha Franklin, it is not to impress but because it is part of his life, the philosophy and art that he lives with and that speak to him about joy, pain, devotion, the struggle to understand -- the terrible grief that can paralyze a person who has lost a cat, for instance. Just a short-lived little animal that interacts with us at what many people would see as the trivial level of an animate plush toy with an appetite. Yet a creature for whom one can develop an intense devotion (maybe "insane"; the title comes from a Gerald Stern poem) that rivals or even surpasses that which we feel for a spouse, partner, friend, or child. If I could devote the time right now, I would write pages and pages on this wonderful book and its deeply thoughtful (and often surprisingly amusing) study of pet cats and of human lovers -- but I have my own devotions to tend to, one of them my dog. So just a quote: "I'd had other cats before this, but only in the sense that the singer of 'Norwegian Wood' once had a girl." Or, on the need of intelligent species to be entertained: "the crowning achievement of our species may not be writing or the pyramids or the cathedral at Chartres -- all of which, face it, can be boring -- but Grand Theft Auto. I'm not sure if it would be possible to make a cat understand what writing is for. (Maybe if you could somehow demonstrate that it was our way of rubbing ourselves against the furniture or, alternatively, of spraying). But I can imagine a cat staring raptly at Grand Theft Auto, especially on a big screen."

[Kathleen Maher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Trachtenberg's book about his cats, his girlfriend who becomes his wife, and her cats, the family they make together, and how it changes, is fascinating and often fun. The book deftly includes so many aspects of his devotion--to cats and persons--both religious and personal, that I was amazed--a word I try not to use lightly.
The trustworthy structure moves well while including various Biblical, Gnostic, and historical references; also poetry, art, and a coherent but graceful moral reckoning. All of which make the book seductive. The cats, too, are seductive and distinctive--and not whimsical as many cat lovers seem to portray them. The story recounts the author's foibles and mishaps--his devotion here being real, not divine.
Insane or otherwise (if otherwise is possible), devotion requires recognizing every creature as unique. Trachtenberg's non-fiction story about honoring that uniqueness, or trying to, stayed with me. The endeavor is admirable because we so often fail to treat any creature, even ourselves, as unique. And--the book is amazing.Another Insane Devotion: On The Love of Cats and Persons

[Barbara Barth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this book after an intriguing review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I cannot believe the reviewer invested any time beyond reading the description on the jacket cover...

I may have enjoyed the book if the Trachtenberg had limited his ramblings to cat burbles. But he would have had to market it as a pamphlet instead of a book! I disliked the detours into Trachtenberg's sex-capades with women (known only by their first initials to spare them further humiliation?). His use of profanity was awkward.

After the first chapter I only kept reading to fin out if he found his cat!

I feel bad for any cat that ever found itself in this man's care.

[Sherri Mc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I generally do not read non-fiction. I am especially cautious of reading a book if an animal plays a major role in the story. I hate to read anything where a animal is in peril. I took a chance on Another Insane Devotion.

I was not disappointed. It was like reading Milan Kundera with cats added to the mix of relationships that needed untangling. The language was straightforward and economical, but replete with insight. There were some tough spots to read for a tender-hearted cat lover like myself, but the author’s pursuit of understanding and empathy got me though them. I loved this book. I’m glad I took the chance.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the author's relationships with cats and with women, looking at different points in his life, with the central focus being a trip to find one of his cats that has disappeared while he is working in another state for the summer. Interspersed are comments and philosophy about relationships in general and about the relationships between cats and people. There is a compulsion to see how things turn out that keeps you reading, even though it is not a compelling read, per se. There is also a sense of dread throughout about the fate of Biscuit the cat and about the author's marriage to F., with an ending that somehow is not a resolution.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great scientific insights on the feline species, and I loved Trachtenberg's historical, artistic, and literary references. Even if I didn't know a thing about most of the paintings and stories he was talking about, I felt like I learned something. And while he says a lot about his relationships with various cats and women, he didn't do a very good job distinguishing them from each other. I was never quite sure which girlfriend or cat he was referring to.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

My daughter picked up this short book for me because of the pretty cover. It wasn't what it purported to be - instead it was a story about a selfish guy who ignores his wife and loses his cats. Sometimes the writing was insightful; a lot of it was philosophical; but never did this memoir make me want to know the writer better. Meh.

[Candice · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did, as I am a cat owner and lover, but by turns I found it appealing, insightful, philosophical, humorous, irritating, depressing, cynical and off-putting. He loves, loves, loves his cats and yet as he describes them, they don't seem to return any real affection, and it seems that he and his wife, "F." care more for the animals than they do for each other.

[Johannes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, sprawling essay about too many things to mention here. In the end, it doesn't really matter what Trachtenberg is writing about, because, like the best essayists, he makes familiar territory fresh--makes almost any topic interesting. I couldn't stop turning the pages.

[Jennifer Debruler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm too far down the Crazy Cat Lady path, but the tangents off into religion and philosophy were too distracting, without being engaging. Yes, Hume, Adam and Eve, blah, blah, blah, are important, but give me more about Biscuit, Gattino, and F. They are why I was reading the book.

[LemontreeLime · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to literally force myself to finish this one. I had hoped for interesting things and funny stories about cats, but was not counting on the deliberate exhibition and memoir of the author's sexual libido.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not just about cats but they are central to the narrative and that's what I found most interesting in this engaging memoir. Devotees of feline companionship should much to enjoy here.

[Joy Airaudi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get past the fact that the author is a self-centered ass.