Christopher Smart's Cat

by Igor Webb

This is a book about displacement, flight, settlement and resettlement, about “life and death in the Pannonian plain,” as Igor Webb writes, appropriating the old Roman name for today’s Central Europe in order to identify the geographical place as also the metaphorical center, the crossroads, of twentieth century history and culture. Told from the vantage point of those, like the author, who were children in the Holocaust, the book is a beautifully crafted meditation on great writers—from Virginia Woolf to W.G. Sebald, from Philip Roth to Danilo Kiš—as well as a gripping tale alive with remarkable characters. None more remarkable than Christopher Smart (1722-1771), whose ecstatic verse mysteriously provides the book with its title.

220 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[El]

Is it possible to tell one's own story in a non-linear manner? I say yes! Annnnnnd most everyone else says no. Igor Webb seems to agree, if Christopher Smart's Cat is any indication, that a story can be told in different directions - our memories are rarely precisely linear, so why should our writing be?

In this memoir, Webb writes about displacement and identity. He was born in Slovakia and survived World War II (though his grandparents suffered a different fate). He writes about moving with his parents to New York and being raised Christian initially as an act of self-preservation. He writes about literature and the magic of modern America (as he saw it as a child) and what it all somehow means.

This was a fascinating memoir and not always an easy read - by that, I wonder if I was smart enough for Webb's writing. You need to take your time with this book, savor the words. Don't do like I did and try to plow through it because it will wind up taking you longer to read it and you will feel dumb. Don't feel dumb.

National memory... serves an ideological master who doesn't want to know or to understand but instead to supplant one politics (and so one official past) with another. The Pannonian writers, in contrast, have always been patriots of the individual, not the nation. Individual memory depends precisely on knowing and understanding for the very survival of the self

But this is another instance where it's a lot easier said than done: individual identity in twentieth century Pannonia has been pretty hard to pin down. Hrabal wonders if he has ever been "an identity," and you'd be lucky to come across neat and straightforward family trees drawn under any Pannonian family name (Tamina does not have a family name: she "comes from" a street, and just what that street should be called is altogether unclear).
(p82, "#10. The Names")

At times lyrical, at other times academic, at all times somewhat incredible, I mostly enjoyed reading this because it was unusual enough to make me happy while also being traditional enough not to piss off the people who claim one's story should be told chronologically.