Word: cats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cat's Grin...
...with this paradox that journalist Francois Maspero describes his first novel, Cat's Grin. The tale of a thirteen-year-old boy who seeks his deported parents and missing brother during the upheaval of the French Liberation after the Second World War, Cat's Grin is about the author's own childhood. Yet Maspero protests that the book is "not an autobiography--definitely...
...thirteen-year-old's confusion, incredulity and shock at the whirlwind of tragedy which buffeted him. Fact and fiction are inextricably mixed. To patch the gaps in his memory, Maspero reimagines the half-mad atmosphere of a 1944 France through the widening, narrowing eyes of a child called "Cat...
...nicknamed "maybe because he is as scrawny as a cat." When Cat's story begins, his parents have sent him from Paris, dangerous on the brink of liberation, to live "in exile" in the dull countryside, where his only companions are a few guinea pigs and two tough old rabbits...
...Cat especially misses his older brother Antoine, who likes explaining things as much as Cat likes asking questions. When Antoine shoots three German officers and runs away to join the maquis, the Gestapo questions and deports his parents. Cat reels with uncomprehending shock. He runs away from the smug, bourgeois household of his aunt and uncle and embarks on a series of adventures in hope of finding his brother...