I read this novel in one sitting, about two hours. I was working on something that should have taken priority. Not gonna lie I thought it would be light reading for a short break. But I was wrong.
The story is simple. This novel is a fable about a cat who taught a baby seagull to fly. We followed Zorbas, a large and fat black cat from the port of Hamburg. He was sunning himself on a balcony when a seagull named Kengah fell on top of him, her body covered in black oil. Kengah was dying. Before she died, she asked Zorbas to keep her egg warm and teach her chick to fly. Zorbas agreed. From there, everything got complicated.
Zorbas was the sole reason I couldn’t put the book down. He was a cat who hesitated, but kept his word anyway, even though he had every reason to walk away. He was clearly the best boy ever. And Luis Sepúlveda wrote him so well, with precise and accurate cat behavior.
When I reached the last page, I had tears in my eyes. I’m a cat person and I can't help it. I care too much about the characters. I wanted to know what Zorbas had for dinner after all of it. I wanted to know how the chick’s life turned out after she learned to fly. Something lingered, but not because the story was unfinished. Quite the opposite.
What bothered me most, in the best way possible, was how easily I recognized myself in the portrait of humans that Sepúlveda painted. The oil dumped into the sea killed Kengah. The people who dumped it never saw Kengah die. They didn’t have to. And as long as it didn’t feel immediate, it was easy not to care. I was part of that. Aren’t we all?
But Sepúlveda wouldn’t judge or preach. He simply told a story from the animal point of view, and suddenly everything looked different. There was a parrot caged to mimic meaningless chatter. A chimpanzee was put to work in an antique shop and given glass after glass of beer until he became an alcoholic, and a pet cat whose freedom was restricted without his owner ever realizing it. None of this was delivered with anger. It came with humor, which somehow made it more painful.
Sepúlveda lived in exile in Hamburg for many years, and it was there that the story took shape. The name Zorbas came from his own cat, named after his favorite novel, Zorba the Greek.
I didn’t know why those details made me feel differently about the book. Maybe because I wanted to believe that Zorbas had actually existed, somewhere in a corner of Hamburg, asleep, unaware that his story had been read by millions.
Daily HSBI Raffle
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