The main protagonist of this picture book is a young cat in its prime “with a stump tail, with brown and black piebald fur and small triangular ears”. A proud and courageous cat “who doesn’t care if someone laughs at her because of her stubby tail”. A cat that the fictional writer who is writing her story immediately takes to the heart – and with him the readers of “The Writer and the Cat”, which Petra Dünges translated from Arabic.
In an artful and finely balanced network of text and images, the Lebanese author Nabiha Mheidly and the Egyptian illustrator Walid Taher tell of the writer, the cat and storytelling. While the text describes the creative process from the perspective of the writer – “One day I sat down again to write a story. However, every story needs a good idea.” -, Taher’s lively mixed media pictures show the poet and his world in the colors gray, green and red. In which he sits barefoot on the sofa and at the desk and collects, sorts and carefully examines his ideas; a world in which imaginary figures come to life, like the young cat with the stubby tail that happily hugs him or seeks protection on his lap when the adventures get too precarious. “Please, help me!” She pleads. But he replies: “You are the heroine here … you have to find the way out yourself.”
A life between two book covers is not the right thing
Because he is only a chronicler of the cat: from his desk he observes what is happening in the scene he has chosen, suffers and feverishly; He conscientiously writes down everything the cat experiences without intervening himself. And so he also has to accept that, after a happy ending, the cat discovers that a life in a single story, locked between two book covers, is not the right one for them. She waves him goodbye briefly and at the same time has disappeared. That’s just how cats and their stories are – headstrong, lovable and wonderful. (from 6 years)
Nabiha Mheidly / Walid Taher: The writer and the cat. From the Arabic by Petra Dünges. Rieder 202o, 32 pages, 14 euros.