First of all, the title and the last name of the author aren’t written exactly like this, but I have no idea how to write it with the right characters, sorry about that.
He’s a Serbian author and this is his first work that I’ve read. I liked it very much. It’s a small book, 139 pages the one in my hands, and written with rather big characters, but that’s no problem at all, I enjoyed very much reading it. I thought it was nice, intriguing and funny. The ending was a little hurried and not completely explained, but that can’t erase the nice moments and laughs it caused me while reading it.
The protagonist is a writer, we follow his thoughts and what he does. The whole book’s plot starts and finishes in one day. He is obsessed with receiving messages and checking them immediately, and he’s also obsessed with saving every single e-mail into different folders.
He lives alone and hasn’t written anything in a while, he’s stuck. He has a cat that he ‘rescued’ one day: he was walking and this little kitty did his big cat-eyes at him and he brought him home. Since then, they have learned to live together and of course the cat is not as ‘little’ anymore.
The story starts with our writer receiving an e-mail from someone who won’t give his real identity but conceal himself under ‘a fan’, Ammiratore. He asks him to write something for him and give him all the credits. Our writer (who goes by the name Felix as his cat when online) is outraged, but keeps replying with calm and politeness.
Usually Felix doesn’t receive many letters all at once, but today seems to be an exception. After his ‘fan’, four other pen-friends fill his day. We read each e-mail with him, read his thoughts, and then his replies. From time to time his cat disrupts his thoughts doing something, like walking on his desk, sleeping on his notebook - which is not a big bother since he usually uses the big one.
Whenever he gets irritated his cat shoos the anger away. We learn of the difficulties he went through the first days of their living together, when he didn’t know how a cat releases energy from time to time running around playing, how the cat keeps sharpening his claws on his furniture, how he once fell off the window scaring him to death, how they have slowly become inseparable, so much that he now loves his cat dearly... it’s adorable how he talks about how he doesn’t want to wake him up when it sleeps on his notebook, how it has slowly become the center of his world and the master of the house...
the pen-friends stories are rather bizarre and sometimes funny.
Altomare is another writer, who thinks the outmost of himself and he’s probably jealous that his work isn’t recognised as much as Felix’s , Banana is a flashy big woman who approached him one day and started sending him her impressions upon reading his books before sending him her own attempt at writings, which means various different episodes based on dreams she dreamed on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday (other nights’ dreams don’t matter to her); the episodes are all so different that it doesn’t seem a book at all, and she’s waiting to dream the dream that will link them all together.
There’s P-0, also a fan of course, who sent him a pastiche after the other, based on his own books (basically he started from the original, changing many things but keeping the soul of it, more or less) and then there is Pandora, an old woman who lives in the same building: they met at the veterinary, she has a very old dog and they started talking and then they exchanged e-mails, and she also started sending him little things she wrote, at first about little moments with animals as protagonists, then about her walks with her dog.
The curious thing is that today they all have strange requests.
P-0 has already wrote a pastiche for all his books, so he says he would like to write the pastiche before the original, and wants him to write the original based on his pastiche, which of course makes no sense.
Banana tells him that she finally dreamed the conclusive dream: she saw him writing it! and then since they were both half naked they did... that, and now she wants him to write the most important (and impossible) chapter for her, and her letters become more and more incoherent, talking about her ‘book’ as if she was a single mother and he was leaving her without acknowledging their son.. at last he stops replying to her and she becomes aggressive in her last letter.
Pandora says that her dog is about to die - too old and unwell - and she wishes he will write a book about her dog so that reading it might soothe her pain.
Another curious thing is that today they all start telling him that he should write it using a pseudonym and they all suggest Felix.
He doesn’t want to do what they ask of him and at first he replies politely trying to make them understand that , but when they insist and insist he gives up and stops replying.
The same thing goes for Altomare too, he talks to him about writing under another name, then about doing parodies of his own work, using the name Felix.
After he stops replying to them, he concentrates on his ‘fan’, and him too suggests using the name Felix so he wonders who that is, how he knows him, and if he might be one of the others...
but then the cat makes him stop all this nonsense, and we understand that he himself was writing as his ‘fan’ using his notebook, and that the purpose of all this was to be able to write again, and it works. He says he’ll write to the other four accepting to do what they ask in his own way, all of them together, because like the ‘fan’ said, he won’t be stuck anymore and he’ll be able to write... this book, I’d say, is the final result. Writing about the cat Felix will be the solution to his problem.
The letters were quite funny as the story progresses :-D
It was a very nice read. It only stopped too abruptly, leaving me a bit... I mean, why did he agree with the others who were so insistent and in Banana’s and Altomare’s case even rude in the end? And more, what were they all threatening to do to him if he didn’t agree? We’ll never know.
There was a point half-way through where one ponders: how is it that the notebook is opened if he’s not using it? (when he says he hurries to close it so the cat can sleep on it since he likes that). Still, as always I don’t like to stop and think of things, I’m not interested in guessing the ending, I’d rather be surprised. Anyway, it was just a little clue, that is recalled at the end, when he says that he quickly sends the last email so he can close the notebook for the cat again.
ITA il ghostwriter.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento