In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first
published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in
Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between
Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community
of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and
more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and
public, that impinged on his life as a writer.
All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is a
confessional memoir, the chronicle of an author who becomes overwhelmed.
As he is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas created by his
indulgent love for the animals, there are episodes of intense brutality
as he controls the feline population. Yet in the end, All My Cats is a
book about Hrabal's relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources
of redemption that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the
cosmos--and about love.