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All My Cats
Hrabal is 'one of the greatest European prose writers' (Philip Roth) and an extraordinarily eccentric character -- there are wonderful photos of him and his many cats
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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2804 people want to read
About the author
Bohumil Hrabal
185 books1,319 followersBorn in Brno-Židenice, Moravia, he lived briefly in Polná, but was raised in the Nymburk brewery as the manager's stepson.
Hrabal received a Law degree from Prague's Charles University, and lived in the city from the late 1940s on.
He worked as a manual laborer alongside Vladimír Boudník in the Kladno ironworks in the 1950s, an experience which inspired the "hyper-realist" texts he was writing at the time.
His best known novels were Closely Watched Trains (1965) and I Served the King of England. In 1965 he bought a cottage in Kersko, which he used to visit till the end of his life, and where he kept cats ("kočenky").
He was a great storyteller; his popular pub was At the Golden Tiger (U zlatého tygra) on Husova Street in Prague, where he met the Czech President Václav Havel, the American President Bill Clinton and the then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright on January 11th, 1994.
Several of his works were not published in Czechoslovakia due to the objections of the authorities, including The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Městečko, kde se zastavil čas) and I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále).
He died when he fell from a fifth floor hospital where he was apparently trying to feed pigeons. It was noted that Hrabal lived on the fifth floor of his apartment building and that suicides by leaping from a fifth-floor window were mentioned in several of his books.
He was buried in a family grave in the cemetery in Hradištko. In the same grave his mother "Maryška", step father "Francin", uncle "Pepin", wife "Pipsi" and brother "Slávek" were buried.
He wrote with an expressive, highly visual style, often using long sentences; in fact his work Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964) (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé) is made up of just one sentence. Many of Hrabal's characters are portrayed as "wise fools" - simpletons with occasional or inadvertent profound thoughts - who are also given to coarse humour, lewdness, and a determination to survive and enjoy oneself despite harsh circumstances. Political quandaries and their concomitant moral ambiguities are also a recurrent theme.
Along with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera - who were also imaginative and amusing satirists - he is considered one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century. His works have been translated into 27 languages.
Hrabal received a Law degree from Prague's Charles University, and lived in the city from the late 1940s on.
He worked as a manual laborer alongside Vladimír Boudník in the Kladno ironworks in the 1950s, an experience which inspired the "hyper-realist" texts he was writing at the time.
His best known novels were Closely Watched Trains (1965) and I Served the King of England. In 1965 he bought a cottage in Kersko, which he used to visit till the end of his life, and where he kept cats ("kočenky").
He was a great storyteller; his popular pub was At the Golden Tiger (U zlatého tygra) on Husova Street in Prague, where he met the Czech President Václav Havel, the American President Bill Clinton and the then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright on January 11th, 1994.
Several of his works were not published in Czechoslovakia due to the objections of the authorities, including The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Městečko, kde se zastavil čas) and I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále).
He died when he fell from a fifth floor hospital where he was apparently trying to feed pigeons. It was noted that Hrabal lived on the fifth floor of his apartment building and that suicides by leaping from a fifth-floor window were mentioned in several of his books.
He was buried in a family grave in the cemetery in Hradištko. In the same grave his mother "Maryška", step father "Francin", uncle "Pepin", wife "Pipsi" and brother "Slávek" were buried.
He wrote with an expressive, highly visual style, often using long sentences; in fact his work Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964) (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé) is made up of just one sentence. Many of Hrabal's characters are portrayed as "wise fools" - simpletons with occasional or inadvertent profound thoughts - who are also given to coarse humour, lewdness, and a determination to survive and enjoy oneself despite harsh circumstances. Political quandaries and their concomitant moral ambiguities are also a recurrent theme.
Along with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera - who were also imaginative and amusing satirists - he is considered one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century. His works have been translated into 27 languages.
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November 26, 2019
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
i know i’m going to get a lot of flak for this, and i know i am being unreasonable; having an emotional instead of an intellectual reaction, and the last thing i want to do is to be writing a negative review of a Very Important Author’s long-untranslated book coming out on a Very Respected Small Press five months before its release, but i’m an honest person, and at the end of the day, i’m just me: don’t let my experience prevent you from making your own reading choices. just…i think it is important to know what this book is before reading it. had i known, i would probably still have read it, but it is not the book i would have chosen to read at this particular time.
sometimes i am sad. sometimes i am stressed. sometimes i just want to read a short book about a man with a lot of cats who loves them an unreasonable amount to palate-cleanse my brain and give me some warm fuzzies, and i think that if a book is actually about a man overcoming his guilt over the many many occasions in which he put a cat or several cats into a canvas mail bag and swung them against a tree to kill them, followed by smashing their tiny heads in with an axe when the tree-bashing method doesn’t ‘work,’ maybe mention that in the book’s description, in as coded a way as feels appropriate, but in this day and age of trigger warnings and sensitivity readers, maybe at least put it out there.
and maybe they tried—the synopsis says that it is best seen as a sensationalized memoir that reads as a novel, the chronicle of a cat-lover who becomes overwhelmed by his cats and his life and is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas his indulgent love for the animals has created.
i had interpreted this “madness” brought on by the “indulgent love” of his cats to be the "crazy cat lady" type of madness—where cats take over the living space and humans sleep on the floor so that their cats may have a softer place to lay their weary cat bodies. NOT that a man would be plagued by visions of the cats he murdered and then—kill more of them.
whether this is fictionalized memoir or truefact is irrelevant. i have read incredibly graphic scenes of violence against people and animals before and been unaffected. but usually, i knew what i was getting into. if you’re a fan of grit lit, like i am, you know there’s gonna be some uncomfortable content. i just wasn’t expecting it here. i was expecting charming feline love, but this ain’t james herriot.
i am well aware that hrabal had a hard life, that he had emotional damage, that he eventually killed himself.* i am well aware than in the pie chart of “bad things that happened in the history of eastern europe,” a few dead cats would make up only a dieter’s slice.
but MAN, those poor creatures…kittens, pregnant cats, cats with whom he had established a bond, felt love for—it’s just brutal. and i’m even willing to consider the possibility that this is more metaphor than memoir, but regardless of whether this is something he “actually” did, these were not the kind of scenes i had anticipated encountering in a book with that charming a cover,
with this photo at the front.
this was written in 1983, in a time and place where there were other options to thinning one’s feral cat herd. in fact, he lies about the manner in which they were dispatched, telling his wife that he brought them to the vet who employed chloroform. which makes it clear that he knew the old “put em in a bag and hit 'em a few times against a tree” method was not the only path, nor even the most effective/efficient method, as some of the instances will gruesomely attest.
that he—not compares himself to, necessarily, but references a few times—raskolnikov, does not make his guilt more profound.
that he buries them with flowers and headstones is no comfort when those headstones start racking up.
that he points to the lives of songbirds uneaten by cats as a half-assed excuse for their deaths does not absolve him. for me, it makes it worse, because—birds. shudder.
that he killed a pregnant cat because he was pissed at her for frightening a bunny to death one time while teaching her kittens about hunting does not justify his decision.
that he rhapsodizes over their deaths, fetishizing his guilt into the purplest of prose, mitigates nothing:
to judge it solely on the writing, like a proper reviewer, it suffers from repetition. not so much his wife’s repeated wailed refrain of “what are we going to do with all these cats?” which punctuates the narrative frequently, yet works almost on a percussive, musical level, but—among other oft-recurring phrases and images—we hear about the ‘green handles’ of a left-behind handbag so many times. in context, it’s a chilling reminder for hrabal, but it doesn’t quite work as a motif, not even as a foil for that…other bag. i don’t know anything about this book’s publishing history—whether these 100 or so pages were cobbled together from notebooks or whether it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1997, and maybe the repetitions are a result of some hasty editorial process, but in a book this slight, they really stand out.
anyway, no, i did not enjoy reading this. it did NOT give me the warm fuzzies i needed to distract me from my anxiety over the neverending horror of world news coverage or my own life's disappointments.
but, your mileage&etc.
run from the bad man, kitties!
* the official cause of death is falling out of a hospital window while feeding pigeons (FFS), but i was almost certain he had killed himself, and in my very cursory research on the matter, apparently there's some speculation about whether his fall was accidental or intentional, but in any case, he was for sure suicidal and thought and wrote about his own death and suicidal ideation frequently.
****************************************
jesus christ.
not what i was expecting.
review to come.
come to my blog!
Somehow I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the way girls used to love me when I was young. I was everything to my cats, father and lover. But the cat with the white feet and the white bib, Blackie, loved me most of all. Whenever I'd look at her, she'd go all soft and I'd have to pick her up and for a moment I'd feel her go limp from the surge of feeling that flowed from me to her and back again, and I would groan with pleasure.
Those mornings, when the five cats would crawl into bed with us, were moments of family bliss.
i know i’m going to get a lot of flak for this, and i know i am being unreasonable; having an emotional instead of an intellectual reaction, and the last thing i want to do is to be writing a negative review of a Very Important Author’s long-untranslated book coming out on a Very Respected Small Press five months before its release, but i’m an honest person, and at the end of the day, i’m just me: don’t let my experience prevent you from making your own reading choices. just…i think it is important to know what this book is before reading it. had i known, i would probably still have read it, but it is not the book i would have chosen to read at this particular time.
sometimes i am sad. sometimes i am stressed. sometimes i just want to read a short book about a man with a lot of cats who loves them an unreasonable amount to palate-cleanse my brain and give me some warm fuzzies, and i think that if a book is actually about a man overcoming his guilt over the many many occasions in which he put a cat or several cats into a canvas mail bag and swung them against a tree to kill them, followed by smashing their tiny heads in with an axe when the tree-bashing method doesn’t ‘work,’ maybe mention that in the book’s description, in as coded a way as feels appropriate, but in this day and age of trigger warnings and sensitivity readers, maybe at least put it out there.
and maybe they tried—the synopsis says that it is best seen as a sensationalized memoir that reads as a novel, the chronicle of a cat-lover who becomes overwhelmed by his cats and his life and is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas his indulgent love for the animals has created.
i had interpreted this “madness” brought on by the “indulgent love” of his cats to be the "crazy cat lady" type of madness—where cats take over the living space and humans sleep on the floor so that their cats may have a softer place to lay their weary cat bodies. NOT that a man would be plagued by visions of the cats he murdered and then—kill more of them.
whether this is fictionalized memoir or truefact is irrelevant. i have read incredibly graphic scenes of violence against people and animals before and been unaffected. but usually, i knew what i was getting into. if you’re a fan of grit lit, like i am, you know there’s gonna be some uncomfortable content. i just wasn’t expecting it here. i was expecting charming feline love, but this ain’t james herriot.
i am well aware that hrabal had a hard life, that he had emotional damage, that he eventually killed himself.* i am well aware than in the pie chart of “bad things that happened in the history of eastern europe,” a few dead cats would make up only a dieter’s slice.
but MAN, those poor creatures…kittens, pregnant cats, cats with whom he had established a bond, felt love for—it’s just brutal. and i’m even willing to consider the possibility that this is more metaphor than memoir, but regardless of whether this is something he “actually” did, these were not the kind of scenes i had anticipated encountering in a book with that charming a cover,
with this photo at the front.
this was written in 1983, in a time and place where there were other options to thinning one’s feral cat herd. in fact, he lies about the manner in which they were dispatched, telling his wife that he brought them to the vet who employed chloroform. which makes it clear that he knew the old “put em in a bag and hit 'em a few times against a tree” method was not the only path, nor even the most effective/efficient method, as some of the instances will gruesomely attest.
that he—not compares himself to, necessarily, but references a few times—raskolnikov, does not make his guilt more profound.
that he buries them with flowers and headstones is no comfort when those headstones start racking up.
that he points to the lives of songbirds uneaten by cats as a half-assed excuse for their deaths does not absolve him. for me, it makes it worse, because—birds. shudder.
that he killed a pregnant cat because he was pissed at her for frightening a bunny to death one time while teaching her kittens about hunting does not justify his decision.
that he rhapsodizes over their deaths, fetishizing his guilt into the purplest of prose, mitigates nothing:
...once again I saw the eyes of the cats I had beaten to death, their reproachful eyes, eyes that had no idea I would kill them, eyes that knew they loved me. Their kittens had been born in my bed, they trusted and had boundless faith in me, they were happy only with me and in my house, and I had beaten them to death in a mail bag, like vermin. That they had brought me songbirds, or baby quail, or pheasant chicks, or little rabbits, was something they could not help doing because they were showing off their prowess, giving me a gift of their prey, and if that were so, then I should have had them shot, a game warden or a hunter should have come, someone other than me should have killed them. Thus I was guilty, not because I had beaten them to death but because I had murdered love. That was my sin.
to judge it solely on the writing, like a proper reviewer, it suffers from repetition. not so much his wife’s repeated wailed refrain of “what are we going to do with all these cats?” which punctuates the narrative frequently, yet works almost on a percussive, musical level, but—among other oft-recurring phrases and images—we hear about the ‘green handles’ of a left-behind handbag so many times. in context, it’s a chilling reminder for hrabal, but it doesn’t quite work as a motif, not even as a foil for that…other bag. i don’t know anything about this book’s publishing history—whether these 100 or so pages were cobbled together from notebooks or whether it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1997, and maybe the repetitions are a result of some hasty editorial process, but in a book this slight, they really stand out.
anyway, no, i did not enjoy reading this. it did NOT give me the warm fuzzies i needed to distract me from my anxiety over the neverending horror of world news coverage or my own life's disappointments.
but, your mileage&etc.
run from the bad man, kitties!
* the official cause of death is falling out of a hospital window while feeding pigeons (FFS), but i was almost certain he had killed himself, and in my very cursory research on the matter, apparently there's some speculation about whether his fall was accidental or intentional, but in any case, he was for sure suicidal and thought and wrote about his own death and suicidal ideation frequently.
****************************************
jesus christ.
not what i was expecting.
review to come.
come to my blog!
August 20, 2021
Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/C48cYa2uB20
Hrabal è uno scrittore immenso. Una prosa estremamente musicale, densa di tinte fosche e umorismo nero. “Io e i miei gatti” è crudele, scioccante, disgustosamente umano. Un vortice kafkiano che parte come un delicato slice-of-life e corre rapido verso un’espiazione impossibile dai contorni quasi horror.
Libro curioso, assolutamente non per tutti. Per i gattari è una lettura molto complicata.
Conoscevo già di fama il titolo, quindi ero preparato sul contenuto. Avviso gli incauti che non lo conoscono: NON È UN LIBRO COCCOLOSO CON I GATTINI ALLA “FINCHÉ IL CAFFÈ È CALDO”, MI RACCOMANDO. STATE ATTENTI.
Hrabal è uno scrittore immenso. Una prosa estremamente musicale, densa di tinte fosche e umorismo nero. “Io e i miei gatti” è crudele, scioccante, disgustosamente umano. Un vortice kafkiano che parte come un delicato slice-of-life e corre rapido verso un’espiazione impossibile dai contorni quasi horror.
Libro curioso, assolutamente non per tutti. Per i gattari è una lettura molto complicata.
Conoscevo già di fama il titolo, quindi ero preparato sul contenuto. Avviso gli incauti che non lo conoscono: NON È UN LIBRO COCCOLOSO CON I GATTINI ALLA “FINCHÉ IL CAFFÈ È CALDO”, MI RACCOMANDO. STATE ATTENTI.
May 19, 2020
THIS BOOK IS EXTREMELY DISTURBING! This is NOT a heart warming book about cats. It is BRUTAL. I know the Czechs can be dark in their writing but this gives bleak Russian dramas a run for their money. It’s the story of the author who gets a overwhelmed by over breeding cats and while he loves them, instead of having them humanely put down or FIXED he beats them to death against a tree! It’s very graphic and very DISTURBING!! All the man’s problems would have been solved including the horrid guilt he feels for killing the cats, who so loved him, by taking them to the vet to be fixed or neutered. NEUTER YOUR PETS PEOPLE! Animals will over breed if populations aren’t properly managed.
I picked up the book thinking it was a story about a crazy cat person in a good way. It was a confession of the incredible guilt the man felt at his actions, which were really preventable. He had other options and for someone who professed to so love cats his actions seem to be those of some incredibly unbalanced. This is my first foray into the work of the author and while his style was good, there was a bit too much repetition and his method for dealing with the over population problem so brutal and disturbing. I was so not expecting it when I picked up the book. I am not a person who needs trigger warnings, but I personally felt the cover and synopsis were misleading and should mention that the work contains descriptive violence towards animals which is a deal breaker for many readers. This story is a journey into someone’s guilt and mental illness and will mostly likely keep an animal lover up nights.
I don’t usually buy foods without seeing what is in them so if you tell me this is cream of tomato soup, I will assume it’s regular cream of tomato and not with chunks of fish, peanuts, carrots and bitter chocolate. While that might be for some, I’d just assume pass on it. I feel like this book has added fish and chocolate to my cream of tomato soup and that wasn’t what I thought I was getting into.
I picked up the book thinking it was a story about a crazy cat person in a good way. It was a confession of the incredible guilt the man felt at his actions, which were really preventable. He had other options and for someone who professed to so love cats his actions seem to be those of some incredibly unbalanced. This is my first foray into the work of the author and while his style was good, there was a bit too much repetition and his method for dealing with the over population problem so brutal and disturbing. I was so not expecting it when I picked up the book. I am not a person who needs trigger warnings, but I personally felt the cover and synopsis were misleading and should mention that the work contains descriptive violence towards animals which is a deal breaker for many readers. This story is a journey into someone’s guilt and mental illness and will mostly likely keep an animal lover up nights.
I don’t usually buy foods without seeing what is in them so if you tell me this is cream of tomato soup, I will assume it’s regular cream of tomato and not with chunks of fish, peanuts, carrots and bitter chocolate. While that might be for some, I’d just assume pass on it. I feel like this book has added fish and chocolate to my cream of tomato soup and that wasn’t what I thought I was getting into.
January 2, 2021
A perfectly sized, paced, focused short book. About herding cats, sure, but his experience with cats suggests dynamics of love, creativity, karma, aging, fragility, nature, the history of atrocities in Europe and elsewhere. I love Hrabal’s serious good humor, his general spirit, affectionate, playful, cruel, violent, despondent, tranquil, perceptive, insightful, an artist but not an aesthete — spends time in woods and pubs. Some of the cat stuff, particularly the cats that poo on the rugs, hit too close to home. I’ve often wanted to put one of our cats down for not using the litter boxes but Hrabal really takes it to the next level. Best if you come to this without reading any reviews (other than this one) and just expect a carefree book about owning a lot of cats. Not recommended for fragile animal lovers. A beautiful dust jacket and hard cover from New Directions. Will read more Hrabal before the year is up or soon after. Not sure why I haven’t read everything he’s written yet.
March 14, 2025
Cats are like us. They are loving beyond description. Those who don't like cats probably find that statement hard to believe. Their's is not a servile love, you have to accept it on their terms. At the same time we are merciless and mad, like cats. One thing distinguishes us from them. It is our weakness. A cat can walk away, even after it has shown all the love it can give and make us give all our love to it. Just up and go. We unfortunately struggle with grief.
But if something bad happens to cats because of us, then these similarities are tested. Are we like them? Are we stronger, better, or the same?
Like cats, we/Bohumil Hrabal have our meshugah stunde, "the mad hour", when we act so crazed we cannot recall our actions; then when we realise what we've done, we are left with burning guilt. That is the central action of the story. Hrabal commits an act that tortures him. That is his/our other weakness compared to cats. They don't do guilt. And so they are stronger and more enduring than us. Guilt is a kind of weakness. The cats know it.
I like cats, in fact I love them. But, if a cat were a person, I would hate them. And I wouldn't go near them.
If this was a work of fiction, then it would be a little bit like Crime and Punishment, a book Hrabal refers to often to describe a personal journey not unlike Raskolnikov's.
ADDIT August 23
______________
Thinking of other cats in literature, Montaigne plays with his cat and discusses species relativism - is the cat playing with me or am I playing with the cat, he asks.
James Joyce gives cats their first dialogue in literature and I'm surprised it took so long, 1922, when Leopold Bloom's cat expecting spoils from the recent butcher's visit, utters the immortal "Mrkgnao!" to the world.
Some may dispute this, what about the Cheshire Cat? Well, is that real or imagined? Let that debate rage.
But if something bad happens to cats because of us, then these similarities are tested. Are we like them? Are we stronger, better, or the same?
Like cats, we/Bohumil Hrabal have our meshugah stunde, "the mad hour", when we act so crazed we cannot recall our actions; then when we realise what we've done, we are left with burning guilt. That is the central action of the story. Hrabal commits an act that tortures him. That is his/our other weakness compared to cats. They don't do guilt. And so they are stronger and more enduring than us. Guilt is a kind of weakness. The cats know it.
I like cats, in fact I love them. But, if a cat were a person, I would hate them. And I wouldn't go near them.
If this was a work of fiction, then it would be a little bit like Crime and Punishment, a book Hrabal refers to often to describe a personal journey not unlike Raskolnikov's.
ADDIT August 23
______________
Thinking of other cats in literature, Montaigne plays with his cat and discusses species relativism - is the cat playing with me or am I playing with the cat, he asks.
James Joyce gives cats their first dialogue in literature and I'm surprised it took so long, 1922, when Leopold Bloom's cat expecting spoils from the recent butcher's visit, utters the immortal "Mrkgnao!" to the world.
Some may dispute this, what about the Cheshire Cat? Well, is that real or imagined? Let that debate rage.
December 25, 2019
As a cat lover, I feel compelled to defend this book from the reviewers who are giving it 1 star due to the kitten murders that take place.
The title and cover initially grabbed my attention but I chose to read the book to get insight into someone I know who absolutely loves cats but during certain hard times in her life as a farmer was forced to kill kittens. She became a veterinarian I believe somewhat out of guilt to control the feline population and yet at her job she still constantly puts down cats as part of the role. It’s this guilt that seems to result in acquiring 20 rescue cats that live with her.
It’s obvious in the book that the author loves cats in general and the cats that he cares for but has a similar predicament going on and is absolutely wracked by the guilt over what he did. That’s the main theme. It’s not like these are senseless murders or the author hates cats.
I cried twice during this book. Once during the kitten murder scene and once at the very end in the scene where the author is mourning the death of the swan he failed to save. When I found myself crying the second time I knew this book was powerful. I very rarely will have this reaction while reading.
The first half of the book is beautifully written but it’s the second half that is just stunning with philosophical prose sprinkled in that doesn’t feel heavy handed.
I will definitely read more from this author.
The title and cover initially grabbed my attention but I chose to read the book to get insight into someone I know who absolutely loves cats but during certain hard times in her life as a farmer was forced to kill kittens. She became a veterinarian I believe somewhat out of guilt to control the feline population and yet at her job she still constantly puts down cats as part of the role. It’s this guilt that seems to result in acquiring 20 rescue cats that live with her.
It’s obvious in the book that the author loves cats in general and the cats that he cares for but has a similar predicament going on and is absolutely wracked by the guilt over what he did. That’s the main theme. It’s not like these are senseless murders or the author hates cats.
I cried twice during this book. Once during the kitten murder scene and once at the very end in the scene where the author is mourning the death of the swan he failed to save. When I found myself crying the second time I knew this book was powerful. I very rarely will have this reaction while reading.
The first half of the book is beautifully written but it’s the second half that is just stunning with philosophical prose sprinkled in that doesn’t feel heavy handed.
I will definitely read more from this author.
January 11, 2020
The dismayed reviewers are right: this is not a cuddly book for people who love cats. They will be appalled. People who love swans will also be disappointed. So will people who require happy endings.
For other readers who are maybe more aware of human complexity, Central European history, the art of fiction — and respect a writer’s implacable honesty toward himself — well, they may have a different experience. I hate to say too much about this book*: it deserves to unfold at its own pace without prejudice. I knew nothing about it, having only read Hrabal’s fiction, and I found it tremendously moving.
I’ve lived with cats most of my adult life. Hrabal definitely knows what it means to love a cat and to be loved by it. He also knows terrible things. His little book (call it a confession or a protest) is brilliant. I’m grateful New Directions republished it with its ravishing, disturbing cover by the Japanese-French artist Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita.
____
* In any case a few reviewers have annotated it all in indignant detail, which in my book is a Goodreads crime.
For other readers who are maybe more aware of human complexity, Central European history, the art of fiction — and respect a writer’s implacable honesty toward himself — well, they may have a different experience. I hate to say too much about this book*: it deserves to unfold at its own pace without prejudice. I knew nothing about it, having only read Hrabal’s fiction, and I found it tremendously moving.
I’ve lived with cats most of my adult life. Hrabal definitely knows what it means to love a cat and to be loved by it. He also knows terrible things. His little book (call it a confession or a protest) is brilliant. I’m grateful New Directions republished it with its ravishing, disturbing cover by the Japanese-French artist Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita.
____
* In any case a few reviewers have annotated it all in indignant detail, which in my book is a Goodreads crime.
October 30, 2017
Bohumil Hrabal, el autor, es también el protagonista de esta novela satírica. Disfruta de sus estadías en su casa de campo, y de la compañía de sus gatos, pero se ve desafiado por su incesante voluntad de reproducción. "¿Que vamos a hacer con tantos gatos?", se suele lamentar su esposa. Y Hrabal se encuentra desgarrado entre la responsabilidad de limitar la población y la culpa.
Una novela liviana, aunque no recomendable para amantes de animales ni naturalezas sensibles: Hrabal no se detiene en ningún límite al momento de la sátira.
Hubiera preferido leer otra de sus obras: Trenes rigurosamente vigilados, Una soledad demasiado ruidosa, o hasta Yo serví al rey de Inglaterra".
Una novela liviana, aunque no recomendable para amantes de animales ni naturalezas sensibles: Hrabal no se detiene en ningún límite al momento de la sátira.
Hubiera preferido leer otra de sus obras: Trenes rigurosamente vigilados, Una soledad demasiado ruidosa, o hasta Yo serví al rey de Inglaterra".
September 4, 2022
SPOILER ALERT: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS THE ESSENCE OF THE PLOT
Right then. So. Basically what attracted me to this one was that it was very short and it was about cats, which I love almost as much as oxygen. But unfortunately it works out that the story is about the author having a lot of cats and then killing eight of them very brutally and then, right at the denouement, saying he'd go to hell with eternal guilt. So here's the thing: either the story is true, in which case it's horrible to read about someone brutalising some cats to death, or it's made up in which case you can let him off but it's a pretty weird thing to make up about yourself. The reviews on the back of the book gush about a Dostoevskyian/Raskolnikovian element to the story but I read "Crime and Punishment" at about the age of 15 and this one doesn't go into the psychological depths of that at all, however much it tries - including meditations on the SS murders in the Holocaust. I read it dutifully to the end because I think GoodReads reviews should involve a full reading of the text but I was infuriated at what the author had apparently done and no matter how much he wrote it off and described his sense of guilt I couldn't get over it. Poor cats, rest in peace.
Right then. So. Basically what attracted me to this one was that it was very short and it was about cats, which I love almost as much as oxygen. But unfortunately it works out that the story is about the author having a lot of cats and then killing eight of them very brutally and then, right at the denouement, saying he'd go to hell with eternal guilt. So here's the thing: either the story is true, in which case it's horrible to read about someone brutalising some cats to death, or it's made up in which case you can let him off but it's a pretty weird thing to make up about yourself. The reviews on the back of the book gush about a Dostoevskyian/Raskolnikovian element to the story but I read "Crime and Punishment" at about the age of 15 and this one doesn't go into the psychological depths of that at all, however much it tries - including meditations on the SS murders in the Holocaust. I read it dutifully to the end because I think GoodReads reviews should involve a full reading of the text but I was infuriated at what the author had apparently done and no matter how much he wrote it off and described his sense of guilt I couldn't get over it. Poor cats, rest in peace.
November 29, 2019
“All My Cats” is a short book by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal about the stray cats he tends to at his cottage. It is not, and I probably cannot stress this enough, a warm and fuzzy memoir about a man and his cats. This is not to say that there are not incredibly poignant moment as there are. There are beautiful passages such as this one which, as I continue my ascent into middle age, can’t help but feel an affinity for and identify with:
“Somehow I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the way girls used to love me when I was young. I was everything to my cats, father and lover.”
There’s little doubt that Hrabal has a deep affection for his cats and worries about their welfare in his absence to the point that he abandons engagements to suddenly return home and check that they have not been killed by a hunter or captured and sold to a research lab (apparently very real problems facing strays in his area).
Yet as we all know, cats have kittens. In particular, feral cats present a problem in that even two cats (Hrabal cares for 8 at a time) having 4-5 kittens each, quickly becomes unsustainable. He cannot, as much as he wishes he could, keep them all, and finding homes for ten cats at a time all is all but impossible. Other strays become sick or violent and become a danger to himself, his wife, and other cats.
So Hrabal does something which sickens him. Something which in all candor, sickened me. Something which would sicken anyone with any shred of humanity.
His decision does not come without massive consequences for his soul. He begins to feel an all consuming guilt about what he has done. He sees the murdered cats in his dreams (when he can sleep). He contemplates suicide, and believes that all the misfortune that comes to him is a direct consequence of what he has done:
“The sources of my anguish, of those feelings of guilt, were legion. They had arrived first in arithmetic progression and then grew geometrically, until my suffering was like the magic pot that produced endless amounts of oatmeal porridge. Everywhere I went, despite my efforts to keep a close watch on myself, to suppress those apparitions with all my strength, my guilt and remorse would come at me through the door and seep in through the windows, and everywhere I looked I saw my murdered cats, and I could think of nothing but what had happened to me and what I had done.”
This book is more than anything, a meditation on guilt. On man’s capacity to do evil and the irreparable after affects of that evil on our souls. As Hrabal writes:
“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.”
“I should have had them shot, a game warden or a hunter should have come, someone other than me should have killed them. Thus I was guilty, not because I had beaten them to death but because I had murdered love. That was my sin. I was guilty in my own eyes, and toward morning, when they appeared to me, it was really me accusing myself, because I felt guilty and would go on feeling guilty as long as I remained in the world.”
It is a profound book that is yes, about cats, but also about our humanity and our capacity to cope with evil. It is most definitely not a book for everyone. While I find violence toward animals abhorrent, I am able to still read about it and learn the lessons such violence teaches us about ourselves and who we are. I also accept that some people deal with graphic violence in different ways, so if you do not feel it is something you can cope with, it is probably best to stay away from this book. For everyone else however, there are some valuable, if not deeply uncomfortable, ideas here.
November 22, 2021
El libro es en realidad muy simple, la historia es cortísima. Me parece un poco una trampa, a mi me gustan mucho los gatos y me gusta mucho Hrabal, me ha parecido, hasta donde he leído, que sus historias son ligeras de algún modo, si bien siempre hay conflicto, no me habia tocado tan terrible)) y no es que aquí haya un grandísimo problema (en apariencia), pero si es demasiado violento. La historia va de que el autor, tiene muchos gatos y los ama, pero de alguna manera tiene que controlar que no sean tantos que no pjeda con ellos. Este método de control le traera problemas sonbre si mismo.
Creo que alguien que ame mucho a los gatos, no debería leer este libro, es muy gráfico.
Creo que alguien que ame mucho a los gatos, no debería leer este libro, es muy gráfico.
March 1, 2025
Um murro daqueles.
August 23, 2021
Il protagonista, che è poi l'autore stesso, ama molto i suoi gatti, che a loro volta sono molto affezionati a lui.
E' però un amore che diventa ben presto angosciante, per le paure e le responsabilità che esso comporta, ma soprattutto per i sensi di colpa (in particolare per essersi dovuto liberare di alcuni gattini, ma quello è solo l'inizio).
A dispetto del titolo e della copertina, si tratta infatti di un libro piuttosto violento e "nero". La narrazione delle nefandezze e dei sensi di colpa del protagonista è morbosa.
Anche se ci sono accenni di ironia e di umorismo nero, il romanzo resta molto cupo.
E' il primo libro di questo autore, e mi è piaciuto. E' un romanzo intenso che riesce in pieno nel descrivere l'angoscia personale e renderla "universale".
(Mi ha lasciato però un po' perplesso l'intervista all'autore nel prologo, che è messa lì un po' a casaccio, senza riferimenti su quando e come sia data l'intervista, se è reale, e perché poi nel prologo, boh)
E' però un amore che diventa ben presto angosciante, per le paure e le responsabilità che esso comporta, ma soprattutto per i sensi di colpa (in particolare per essersi dovuto liberare di alcuni gattini, ma quello è solo l'inizio).
A dispetto del titolo e della copertina, si tratta infatti di un libro piuttosto violento e "nero". La narrazione delle nefandezze e dei sensi di colpa del protagonista è morbosa.
Anche se ci sono accenni di ironia e di umorismo nero, il romanzo resta molto cupo.
E' il primo libro di questo autore, e mi è piaciuto. E' un romanzo intenso che riesce in pieno nel descrivere l'angoscia personale e renderla "universale".
(Mi ha lasciato però un po' perplesso l'intervista all'autore nel prologo, che è messa lì un po' a casaccio, senza riferimenti su quando e come sia data l'intervista, se è reale, e perché poi nel prologo, boh)
August 7, 2019
This is not a heartwarming story about cats. This is not a heartwarming story about cats. This is not a heartwarming story about cats. That said, it is a beautifully written meditation whose essence, described by Meghan Forbes of the Los Angeles Review of Books, "is to draw beauty from what isn't, to find hope where we're not likely to look -- to show that we are all of us 'magnificent.'"
My first time reading Hrabal, maybe a strange place to start, but I believe it gave me a glimpse of why others so adore this writer -- a deeply intuitive mind, a heartbreaking sense of self amidst the larger world, a visceral sensitivity to pain and beauty. The book's conflict is not pleasant, but it is depicted honestly. I along with many reviewers, might be confused about Hrabal's actions, but as a work of literature I found his prolonged self-interrogation worthwhile and enlightening.
My first time reading Hrabal, maybe a strange place to start, but I believe it gave me a glimpse of why others so adore this writer -- a deeply intuitive mind, a heartbreaking sense of self amidst the larger world, a visceral sensitivity to pain and beauty. The book's conflict is not pleasant, but it is depicted honestly. I along with many reviewers, might be confused about Hrabal's actions, but as a work of literature I found his prolonged self-interrogation worthwhile and enlightening.
July 24, 2019
hrabal's prose and storytelling prowess are often breathtaking to behold. his quibbling with the morality of felinicide, however, not so much. all my cats finds the late czech author writing about his love for and devotion to his furry-footed friends — as well as the times he opted to kill several of them (including newborn kittens), lest they overrun his rural writing retreat.
hrabal's affection for cats was obviously sincere, as, too, was the intellectual and emotional morass he was left floundering in after reducing their numbers. as an autobiographical snippet of his life, all my cats is intriguing to read, especially as he contends with his own conflicted feelings and angst over what he did (he seemed genuinely plagued with regret, while acknowledging it was for the best [for him and his wife, of course; the cats themselves were evidently not consulted]).
* translated from the czech by paul wilson (haval, kilma, skvorecky)
** 3.5 stars
*** though there will be, of course, no way to ever know, surely several cat-lovers will buy this book for their fellow feline-fond friends (especially given the inviting cover and equivocating jacket copy), hardly expecting to discover that it's as much a book about killing cats as it is about loving them.
hrabal's affection for cats was obviously sincere, as, too, was the intellectual and emotional morass he was left floundering in after reducing their numbers. as an autobiographical snippet of his life, all my cats is intriguing to read, especially as he contends with his own conflicted feelings and angst over what he did (he seemed genuinely plagued with regret, while acknowledging it was for the best [for him and his wife, of course; the cats themselves were evidently not consulted]).
these questions and images came to my mind during those sweat-soaked mornings, and even before the sun came up and the sky grew clear, my feelings of guilt were intensified when i wondered at my audacity in comparing the life and death of cats to the life and death of people. where had that come from? yet having realized that, my feelings of guilt for the death of those kittens and cats did not go away, because 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.
* translated from the czech by paul wilson (haval, kilma, skvorecky)
** 3.5 stars
*** though there will be, of course, no way to ever know, surely several cat-lovers will buy this book for their fellow feline-fond friends (especially given the inviting cover and equivocating jacket copy), hardly expecting to discover that it's as much a book about killing cats as it is about loving them.
September 6, 2021
I guess repeating the warning is fair. There are awful cat murders involved here. Having said that - I think Hrabal is skilled in his handling of such material.
If you've ever lived of a farm or had outdoor cats - you know there is death involved and it's often not pretty. At one point - Hrabal describes a mounting desire to shoot cats that he sees playing with their prey. The brutality goes in all directions and in most of the Hrabal I've read so far - there's at least a brief mention of killing animals for food. So make of that what you will - this isn't silly childish gore - rather it's a man honestly dealing with his place in the world - a world that involves uncontrolled reproduction and what it takes to control that. In this brilliant way - Hrabal sets these conditions just down the road an hour from Praha where much worse things happened at the hands of the Germans only mentioned once. I think it's very skilled and it demonstrates Hrabal's ability to juxtapose shrugging acceptance with brutal rejection.
I read a terrible review that dismissed it as masturbatory. I don't see that at all - there's a desire to bring guilt to resolution - for joy - but not in any selfish form of pleasure chasing.
Hrabal went to the woods to write - to escape the din of the city and listen closer to the muses - but he didn't get what he wanted. Instead he found himself contemplating his role in the world as he begins feeding feral cats. Left with little time to write - he is burdened with his role in nature and finds anything but peace.
I won't spoil anything - but the changes come fast and he soon abandons his will to plot his path in life but instead accepts his fate.
So - why bother? Because not only is his prose sparse and brilliant but his heartfelt honesty is emotionally engaging and the brief asides into self realization are stunning. It works for me - I have greatly enjoyed everything I've read from him and will seek out more.
If you've ever lived of a farm or had outdoor cats - you know there is death involved and it's often not pretty. At one point - Hrabal describes a mounting desire to shoot cats that he sees playing with their prey. The brutality goes in all directions and in most of the Hrabal I've read so far - there's at least a brief mention of killing animals for food. So make of that what you will - this isn't silly childish gore - rather it's a man honestly dealing with his place in the world - a world that involves uncontrolled reproduction and what it takes to control that. In this brilliant way - Hrabal sets these conditions just down the road an hour from Praha where much worse things happened at the hands of the Germans only mentioned once. I think it's very skilled and it demonstrates Hrabal's ability to juxtapose shrugging acceptance with brutal rejection.
I read a terrible review that dismissed it as masturbatory. I don't see that at all - there's a desire to bring guilt to resolution - for joy - but not in any selfish form of pleasure chasing.
Hrabal went to the woods to write - to escape the din of the city and listen closer to the muses - but he didn't get what he wanted. Instead he found himself contemplating his role in the world as he begins feeding feral cats. Left with little time to write - he is burdened with his role in nature and finds anything but peace.
I won't spoil anything - but the changes come fast and he soon abandons his will to plot his path in life but instead accepts his fate.
So - why bother? Because not only is his prose sparse and brilliant but his heartfelt honesty is emotionally engaging and the brief asides into self realization are stunning. It works for me - I have greatly enjoyed everything I've read from him and will seek out more.
September 30, 2017
En este breve libro Bohumil Hrabal nos cuenta su relación con sus gatos. El autor checo sentía un amor apasionado por los gatos, un amor que rozaba la locura. Hrabal es un escritor con el que conecto especialmente y que me transmite muchas sensaciones y por este motivo cuando nos habla de la pasión que siente por sus gatos, con su prosa arrolladora habitual, también la he sentido yo. Pero lo malo es cuando los gatos empiezan a reproducirse sin medida y se convierten en un auténtico problema y es entonces cuando Hrabal convertido en Raskolnikov, se ve obligado a matar a algunos y después vienen los horribles remordimientos. También he sentido todo eso y se me ha hecho algo duro soportarlo. Hrabal siempre honesto, sacando lo peor de si mismo. El libro tiene sus grandes momentos, pero en conjunto me ha gustado algo menos que los otros libros que he leído del autor.
August 7, 2019
this book is both horrible and horrifying. Like a starter manual for serial killers, he gleefully describes how he brutally dispatches cats and kittens from the group of feral cats at his country estate. He is not a crazy cat lover; he is just crazy. apparently a famous author, political dissident and intellectual, he is aware of options to humanely eliminate cats and/or address the overpopulation. He lies about what he is doing showing exactly what kind of person he is. The only high point of this book is that it is short. It is said the author died either accidentally or committed suicide by falling out a window. I can only hope that he tripped over one of his "beloved" cats.
December 26, 2018
Bohumil Hrabal es el narrador, protagonista y autor de este libro. Me ha entretenido, es crudo, sobre todo para los amantes de los gatos. Me ha parecido una prosa fresca, ligera, sencilla. Sobre el protagonista solo diré que me ha parecido un hipócrita, pero no con la gente sino consigo mismo. Un hombre que se mortifica con la culpa, pero que tiene ganas de vivir y encuentra la forma de redimirlas.
Seguiré leyendo más títulos de este autor.
Seguiré leyendo más títulos de este autor.
January 26, 2021
I'm loathe to go on the record proposing a content warning--those who have already read Hrabal will certainly be prepared for what is in store--but in the offhand chance cat-fanciers are taken in unawares by the cover and title, here it is: WARNING! THIS BOOK CONTAINS CAT-MURDER.
March 2, 2024
Okay look, this is MY Goodreads profile and MY rating for MY records, so I GET to give it one star because I did not like the content - and the content detracted from the style and what I might’ve taken from it. Don’t come at me saying I can’t give a bad rating because the content disturbs me. I can and I will and I did.
I may still read other books by Hrabal. I just won’t recommend this one without noting a content warning.
I may still read other books by Hrabal. I just won’t recommend this one without noting a content warning.
April 30, 2021
“What’s that about?”
“Meeeeeeooooooow,” I said.
Incredible. Slim book. 94 pages. First half is good and then something just clicks in halfway through with the writing, just off the charts good imo. Boxed in and underlined much of the text page 57 onward.
“Meeeeeeooooooow,” I said.
Incredible. Slim book. 94 pages. First half is good and then something just clicks in halfway through with the writing, just off the charts good imo. Boxed in and underlined much of the text page 57 onward.
August 10, 2018
El peor libro que he leído en la vida.
June 28, 2023
*3.5
February 14, 2017
La culpa como el sentimiento más mezquino, el que nos deja varados en el dolor, el sentimiento que no nos vuelve mejores sino todo lo contrario. Herederos de la culpa judeocristiana qué fácil es darse golpes de pecho para continuar haciendo el mal.
Gatos, pájaros o humanos, todos dignos de amor y respeto antes que objetivos de nuestras miserias. Arrepentirse cuando el daño ya está hecho, menuda mierda.
Gatos, pájaros o humanos, todos dignos de amor y respeto antes que objetivos de nuestras miserias. Arrepentirse cuando el daño ya está hecho, menuda mierda.
December 22, 2019
This book is alright, but it gets very interesting at the end. The epilogue is amazing, however, and those 10 pages are worth the rest of the book times a hundred.
August 20, 2020
Requires a...strong will..to say the least. Great translation from Paul Wilson. A memoir that is truly unhinged. Many cats die. So does 1 swan. Be warned.
July 28, 2025
Something about the guilt of the writer, the teller of tales of the dead; more and more recently I have started to feel that the ideal form of any art work is that of the nightmare. And this work very much is a nightmare, not just at the level of its despairing, feverish tone, but also through its oneiric strangeness, the central conceit ensuring that Hrabal can write about the sheer moral horror of existence as if it was a farce - and this, of course, sets the despair in even greater relief. The sentences swerve and swivel like blind snakes, phrases and images recur comically like punchlines: devices of the dream-like. And yet we are also continually reminded of real life, of the writer himself, the elements of auto-fiction forming a parallax with the phantasmagorical presentation. This effect of madness results however from a central lucidity: guilt over even the most banal complicity in universal violence, from which one is no more detached by virtue of living off fictions or inhabiting a cabin in the woods. And just like the writer of stories is inescapably a person ensconced in the bloody, concatenated threads of the world, so too does the dreamer of the nightmare in waking life still carry the mind from which those dark visions sprung.
Read
May 22, 2025i feel his level of guilt when garth’s laser pointer isn’t charged
February 2, 2025
Bobumil Hrabal é um escitor com um olhar inconfundível: sentido de humor, tristeza, sensibilidade e extraordinária capacidade de ver e sentir o que muitos estão impossibilitados. O sofrimento impele a razão da sua extraordinária escrita. Um devaneio narrativo.
Todos os Meus Gatos é um livro que fala de gatos mas não é sobre gatos . É um livro biográfico, sobre o peso que carregamos em nós, as feridas e cicatrizes: a culpa, os fantasmas e as dores que nos expiam os males da alma. A necessidade da redenção pelos males da humanidade.
“É neste processo que o texto entra em efervescência, só com esta intuição a conversa se desencadeia, oscilando entre a realidade e a irrealidade, entre a consciência e a inconsciência, entre a arte e a não-arte, entre o esforço e a facilidade. No desporto, a autenticidade das regras chama-se game e a criatividade lúdica play. Mas transpor fronteiras traz sempre um castigo associado e, por isso, no texto, uma certa ininteligibilidade cria o encanto melancólico do fruto proibido, uma ininteligibilidade ….”
Todos os Meus Gatos é um livro que fala de gatos mas não é sobre gatos . É um livro biográfico, sobre o peso que carregamos em nós, as feridas e cicatrizes: a culpa, os fantasmas e as dores que nos expiam os males da alma. A necessidade da redenção pelos males da humanidade.
“É neste processo que o texto entra em efervescência, só com esta intuição a conversa se desencadeia, oscilando entre a realidade e a irrealidade, entre a consciência e a inconsciência, entre a arte e a não-arte, entre o esforço e a facilidade. No desporto, a autenticidade das regras chama-se game e a criatividade lúdica play. Mas transpor fronteiras traz sempre um castigo associado e, por isso, no texto, uma certa ininteligibilidade cria o encanto melancólico do fruto proibido, uma ininteligibilidade ….”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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