Little of what he was writing made it into print-instead he read his work aloud at meetings of an underground literary group, attended by the novelist Josef Skvorecky and run by the poet Jiri Kolar.
Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Morovia, began writing poetry in the forties, and by the following decade switched to prose. In it, we encounter a cat lover trapped in a hell of his own making, driven to the brink of madness.
Do not be fooled by the cuteness of the book’s original title, though. He later gave the same name to one of his cats, a kitten with “white socks and a white bib, and the rest of it had a tabby pattern, but in ginger.” The volume has only recently been translated into English, excellently so by Paul Wilson. Hrabal’s book was originally published in 1986, as Autičko-which translates as “the Little Car,” the nickname Hrabal gave first to his Renault 5, a small white car with ginger-colored seat covers. As I read Bohumil Hrabal’s haunting but strange slip of a memoir, All My Cats, I wondered if the Czech writer would have agreed with him. “If you want to write, keep cats,” Aldous Huxley famously said. Right, Hrabal with one of his cats (courtesy of New Directions)