RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)All My Cats, the most welcoming of the latest batch of his writings to appear in English, does indeed express its author’s fondness for felines, but Hrabal counterbalances that love with the disturbing cruelty of what he feels he has to do to his animal companions to keep their population under control. That the book refuses to disclose whether it is a novelistic memoir or an autobiographical novel only sharpens the discomfiture of its turns from affection to brutality ... an insistently compelling, wholly seductive meditation on guilt and necessity, and on how their interplay compounds our torments ... Just as Hrabal fosters a rhetorical egalitarianism among his details, the long sentence spreads the weight of what he says across an expanding verbal base. This technique adds a lightness to the most violent instances in All My Cats as well ... The equivalence between the comic and the tragic, between the trivial and the momentous, in turn encompasses a merger of author and audience. If you’re not hearing Hrabal’s words in your own head and in your own voice, you may be reading him too quickly.
