Chat Peau

Ludic, sophisticated and subversive Cat O’ Nine Tails delights with its diversity and contrasts. Settings shift from a bar and a woman’s apartment (“Chapeau”), to a middle-class American interior (“Cotton Ball,” and “Battery”), a village in southern France (“Heads or Tails”), Istanbul (“The Obelisk”), a psychiatrist’s office (“Her Story”), a New England town (“The Sign”), Cuba in the late 1950s (“A Miracle”), and the southern California suburbs (“The Last Supper”). The story as representation of reality vies with the workings of storytelling, while stereotypes, especially about cats, are playfully manipulated and allow unanticipated meanings to circulate. The reader is thus invited to enjoy these tales as mimetic fiction, but also to delight in peering behind the fictional veil at the agency of writing. Even the final story, appropriately titled “The Last Supper,” despite being “perhaps the most realistic” as Stoltzfus suggests, participates in the metafictional adventure when the circle of stray cats surrounding a dying woman recalls the circle of cats represented by each of the tales we have just read, whose sign is the “O” of the book’s title.

The volume opens with the story of a sadomasochistic encounter between the dominant Kitty Katz and an ordinary Joe named…well, “Joe,” whom she picks up in a bar. The zany Kitty, claiming lineage from the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet, knows a good deal about French culture, and surrounds herself with various hats (chapeaux), each an expression of her cat skin (chat peau) and her various moods. But this has as little meaning for Joe as do her veiled allusions to Claude Simon, George Sand, and Collette, and her explanation of one of Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymades. Now teasing, now easing up on her cultural allusions, Kitty plays with her ordinary Joe like a cat with a toy amid the mirrored walls of her room that fragment and multiply their increasingly sadoerotic encounter until he becomes the dominant partner and she the willing victim. They bond as author and text with Joe now seeing that “her naked body is the text and that he [is] the author,” a metafictional motif of the reader’s role in the writerly text that applies to any “Joe” or “Jane” reading Stoltzfus’ book, and that will be extended into the remaining tales with their varying degrees of self-reflexivity.

“Cotton Ball” brilliantly recounts in delightful detail a kitten’s play with a ball of yarn whose thread eventually crisscrosses the well-appointed middle-class living room, generating “geometric patterns” whose shapes are reversed in the mirror over the fireplace. The mistress of the house, whose “look of horror” is also reflected in the mirror, reacts like Magritte’s Agitated Reader recoiling before a book in her hand, as she beholds the disruption of her order wrought by the cat’s subversive lines of yarn. The Egyptian cat-goddess Bastet’s power of reincarnation serves as a motif linking Cotton Ball’s chaotic yet geometric patterns with the other “yarns” in the book. Although “The Obelisk,” “Her Story,” and “The Last Supper” follow somewhat more traditional narrative paths, each incorporates in its own way the narrative mirroring associated with metafiction.

“The Obelisk” explores the confluence of cultures in Istanbul from the guileless perspective of a young Muslim boy’s awakening sexuality. Drawn to the obelisk by his concern for the fate of the cats abandoned in a deep walled excavation at its base, Ahmed is also attracted by the hieroglyphs on its face and by a blond woman among the foreign tourists visiting the monument. Wandering through the lovingly described streets of the Golden Horn, Ahmed is momentarily spellbound by the dazzling reflections in a jeweler’s window. Recalling in his reflected reverie the traditional teachings of his father yet enticed by daydreams of the beautiful blond foreigner, Ahmed faces a choice. Bastet seems to speak in favor of tradition when Ahmed picks up a stray kitten and drops it into the pit as the shadow of the obelisk points toward Mecca.

Presented as a dialogue between...