Word: grinned
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...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...
DESPITE ITS energetic style, however, Cat's Grin has some problems of structure and voice. Perhaps because of his background as a journalist, Maspero feels compelled to tell all. Jarringly, he departs from Cat's limited point of view to give the reader information which the thirteen-year-old could not possibly perceive...
...mediocre translation by Nancy Amphoux does not curb the book's tendency to ramble. Nevertheless Cat's Grin is an evocative novel about a time in history which many French would prefer to forget...
Maspero introduces the book with a quotation from Alice in Wonderland, in which the Cheshire Cat vanishes except for his grin. In the same way, Cat grins on, even as his hope for his family dwindles and he remains alone and cynical, keeping up the empty pretense of being a child...
...continues to grin, to fool those who watch him, his substance disintegrates and melts away. As Alice exclaims, "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin...but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I've ever seen in my life...