The Cat: or How I Lost Eternity

By Jutta Richter http://www.juttarichter.de/
Illustrator Rotraut Susanne Berner http://www.zelles.net/websites-und-kunden/detail/site/rotraut-susanne-berner.html
Translator Anna Brailovsky
Published Milkweed edition, 2007,Germany, New York
ISBN 978-1571316760
Annotation
8-year-old Christine stops to talk to a white cat every morning on her way to school making her endlessly late. Christine is in her own world of thought and observation and finds she sharing these thoughts with the willful opinionated alley cat.

Personal Reaction
There is more to Jutta Richter’s short story than just a girl talking to a cat, but each reader will see something different in it’s reflective, artistic narrative.  Each chapter of this book holds a new reflective situation for the young girl with comments, opinions and wisdom from the cat. The chapters are separated by simple black, yellow and white pencil drawings of the pointy yellow-eyed cat in her life. Each illustration is connected to the upcoming situation in an interesting way. Such as the cat holding a sponge in front of a chalkboard with a maze drawn on it. This page is followed by an incident at school where Christine is told to write 200 lines stating there are no talking cats and she will be on time, she chooses to leave out the word “no” in her lines, which sparks the cats commentary about teachers, “Their job is to make disorderly children into orderly students…they always believe they’re wiser than our kind. But teachers only think in school years. They have no idea about eternity…we learn things in life…in life what counts is mice you actually eat”. This book is so thought provoking it would be excellent in a book club or literature group. The philosophical statements of the cat in each chapter would be hot conversation starters. Some questions for reading circles are:
What does the cat mean when she speaks of eternity?
What does Christine think eternity is?
Is the cat real? Could the cat be Christine’s subconscious?
Do you strongly agree with something the cat says? Why?
Do you strongly disagree with something the cat says? Why?
What does Christine mean when she refers to her first half on page 48?
What is your interpretation of Christine’s phrase in the cow field “eternity became small and hunchbacked, and I stamped my foot.”?

**Sophisticated language:  "eternity became small and hunchbacked, and I stamped my foot.”