Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats is an elegant parable of the fallout of fascism, told in a mode that recalls Kafka, Grass, Marquez, and Bruno Shulz. It is the story of a young German, Max Schmidt, and his psychological battles with three felines: a stuffed tiger in his father's Berlin fur shop, a jaguar aboard a life raft in the west Atlantic, and a phantasmal onca in northern Brazil. The plot is quite simple: Max, through his youthful innocence, becomes embroiled in an ill-judged love affair that causes him to run afoul of the emerging Nazi party. He flees Germany, only to become stranded mid-ocean after the freighter on which he has found passage is scuttled in an act of insurance fraud. Eventually, he drifts to Brazil, where he is faced once again with the spectre of fascism--which he flees but is eventually driven to exorcise through an act of bloody violence. Scliar's narrative is understated and sometimes quite comical, but his purpose is wholly serious, and Max and the Cats offers a perspective on fascism that is intriguing--and rather unfamiliar to North American readers.
Max and the Cats briefly gained some fame in Canada when a handful of sensationalist journalists "revealed" that Yann Martel had derived part of the premise for Life of Pi from a review of Scliar's novella. This so-called scandal was unfair to both books, which really have very little in common aside from the fact that both involve a young man adrift on a lifeboat with a big cat. Skeptics who want to assess the extent of Martel's borrowings should read Max and the Cats before judging Martel, but this is a book that deserves to be read for its own considerable merits and not forever bound to its purported double. --Jack Illingworth