St Florence > Home > Clubs & Societies > Book Club > Book of the Month
| January
2006 |
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| Felidae
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| SFBC
Rating: 6½/10 |
by Akif Pirinçci translated by Ralph Noble | ||
| In common with most amateur sleuths, Francis has a keen sense of justice, an inquisitive mind, and is in the right place at the right time. But there Felidae's similarities with the classic detective story end. For Francis has four-and-a-half times the lives Sherlock Holmes had, and twice the curiosity of Miss Marple. And you know what they say about curiosity... |
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| Discussed at Rock House on 19 January 2006 |
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"horrors
East of Aristocats" - REVIEWS |
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| We all agreed
that this book by Akif Pirincci seems to be in a genre of it's own. However, we
also agreed that it is perhaps not a bad thing to read something 'very different'
occasionally. The hero of the novel is a cat called Francis who becomes a super sleuth in order to track down a killer, in his neighbourhood, who is responsible for butchering the local moggies. Sounds rather weird! However, the plot is clever, has pace, and the writing is not bad considering it's been translated from German. We all thought that the novel was rather gruesome in places as it contained a lot of 'blood & gore'. Did the author intend the reader to question the right of humans to experiment on animals? Perhaps he was looking back, for inspiration, into the recent past, when the Nazi regime perpetrated such gruesome things on human beings themselves? A novel perhaps of more questions than answers. The reading group has decided, in future, to award marks out of 10 to the books we read. The average mark for Felidae was 6½ out of 10. |
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| I don't know why it never caught on in the English-speaking world, but the 1989 novel Felidae by Akif Pirinçci was a bestseller in Germany. The protagonist of this Katzenkrimi is a European shorthair cat named Francis. In the novel, written from a cat's perspective, Francis tries to solve a mysterious series of feline murders in his neighborhood. Following the success of Felidae, the Turkish-born author (who came to Germany at the age of nine and now lives in Bonn) wrote two more cat detective stories to create a Felidae trilogy. Pirinçci's second cat mystery was titled Francis, Felidae II (1993) and the third, Cave Canem (Latin for "beware the dog"), was published in 1999. Felidae was translated into at least 17 languages, including English. As far as I know, the 1994 animated film version of Felidae (which featured the voice of the Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer) never even made it into US movie theaters or onto video. Hyde Flippo |
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| Francis, the narrator, is a witty, sardonic, sarcastic, cynical, philosophical, romantic idealist. Be warned that neither this book nor the movie are The Aristocats. No Disneyesque travesty, Felidae's plot is more Silence of the Lambs than Columbo, and its dialogue more Reservoir Dogs than Garfield. And somehow it also manages to incorporate the more esoteric elements of The Wicker Man and the graphic horror of the most lurid horror movie. If you enjoyed any of these, read this book! If you didn't enjoy them, read this book anyway, to see how it should be done! Akif Pirinçci is the German language answer to Desmond Morris and has written several acclaimed non-fiction cat books. This book competently tackles serious issues (consumerism, religion, vivisection, promiscuity, bullying, disability, and even eugenics and Nazism) but I love it for its humour. My wife HATES it when I bring this book to bed. I always end up laughing out loud and insist on reading paragraph after paragraph to her. One of only three books to have this effect. (The other two being Three Men in a Boat and The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.) Greg PS - The DVD (with English soundtrack) is available from Amazon.de |
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your own comments on Felidae to |
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| I loved this book! The story told by a cat about cats has everything you could possibly want in a murder mystery. It even includes a gratuitous sex scene! Not just for crazy cat people. It kept me turning the pages, and Pirinçci's footnotes are amazing. A reader from USA | |||
