THE MEMORY OF THE TAIL

In LiPuma’s novel, a girl wakes up from a fever with the ability to talk to cats, who try to teach her the ways of the world.

After a childhood illness, an unnamed narrator finds she can communicate telepathically with cats. The cats are part of the Order of the Remembered Tail, who are on Earth to teach. The cats speak in philosophical riddles, which the narrator finds frustrating. No one else can see or hear the cats as they try to teach the narrator the meaning of the universe; she struggles to understand them. The cats inform her that this is actually her fourth life and the fourth time they’ve tried to teach her. The cats she interacts with regularly include Midnight (the leader), Echo (who teaches through chaos), Soot (who teaches palindromes), and The Gaze (who teaches by staring). The novel takes the narrator through a series of lessons about such subjects as public humiliation, failure, and having fun. As the narrator continues to learn more, she becomes less tethered to reality, and the people around her begin to question her sanity. (“You sit in dirt and shout at nothing. You forget your own name. You talk to things that aren’t there. That’s not normal.”) A disease tears through her village; the narrator begs the cats to help, but they don’t. She tells them to leave, but again, they refuse. Her frustration with her failure to grasp the cats’ teachings leads her to stop trying—and then everything clicks into place. LiPuma tells an odd, memorably off-beat story. The cats behave like cats; for readers who have lived with cats and wondered what they were thinking, the feline behavior in this novel makes a strange kind of sense. There’s a timeless quality to the narrative, as the novel is not set in any specific place or time. The story’s philosophy suggests Buddhism, as if the cats are leading the narrator toward some kind of enlightenment. It’s a difficult work to get one’s head completely around—the book doesn’t have a plot so much as an uncertain journey toward understanding.

An unusual, strangely engaging philosophical tale.