Tales From a Dubious Wonderland

Cat's Grin

By Francois Maspero

Translated by Nancy Amphoux

Knopf; $16.95; 295 pages.

ASTORY THAT is "completely false and completely true." It sounds like the kind of paradox that the Mad Hatter and the March Hare might fling at poor Alice as she sits with them at the tea table, minding her manners. "Tell us a story that is completely false and completely true!"

It is with this paradox that journalist Francois Maspero describes his first novel, Cat's Grin. The tale of a thirteen-year-old boy who seeks his deported parents and missing brother during the upheaval of the French Liberation after the Second World War, Cat's Grin is about the author's own childhood. Yet Maspero protests that the book is "not an autobiography--definitely not."

The adult author attempts the difficult task of recalling a thirteen-year-old's confusion, incredulity and shock at the whirlwind of tragedy which buffeted him. Fact and fiction are inextricably mixed. To patch the gaps in his memory, Maspero reimagines the half-mad atmosphere of a 1944 France through the widening, narrowing eyes of a child called "Cat."

The boy Luc is so nicknamed "maybe because he is as scrawny as a cat." When Cat's story begins, his parents have sent him from Paris, dangerous on the brink of liberation, to live "in exile" in the dull countryside, where his only companions are a few guinea pigs and two tough old rabbits.

Cat especially misses his older brother Antoine, who likes explaining things as much as Cat likes asking questions. When Antoine shoots three German officers and runs away to join the maquis, the Gestapo questions and deports his parents. Cat reels with uncomprehending shock. He runs away from the smug, bourgeois household of his aunt and uncle and embarks on a series of adventures in hope of finding his brother.

CAT RETURNS with no news of Antoine. He has grown more cynical. All around him, he sees the self-serving, the spineless--those who supported the Occupation in hope of getting extra butter rations, who are now covering up their guilt as hastily as they cover up the traces of the lost deportees. Maspero examines how people compromise their principles during a crisis. He invites the reader to consider questions of personal ethics, when the safety of the individual is at stake.

Everyone hushes up Cat's questions and hides the grim truth about his family with cursory words of reassurance. Laconic about his feelings, Cat has come to expect the worst. The kittenish, playful child has become the Cat that Walks by Himself.

In one particularly well-conceived episode, Cat also learns to play the hypocritical game. On the first day back at school, the teacher tells the students to write a paper about "how I spent my summer." Cat knows the formula for this kind of banal composition, and he dashes off a list of clichees--swimming, sunning, singing campfire songs.

But his teacher calls him an imbecile. How could he forget that this summer was different from all the others--the glorious summer of the Liberation? The next time he writes the essay, Cat knows what kind of drivel to spill out: the joy of a good boy who sees the revival of the City of Light, who rejoices at the sight of the Eiffel Tower rising into the sky, the Arc de Triomphe hung with streamers. What with a finishing touch of a quote from Hugo, Cat gets the highest mark in the class.

PERHAPS THE BEST parts of the novel are its action scenes. His style deft and spare, Maspero tells how Cat and Antoine try to steal food stamps one rainy night. Cat drops the stamps in the mud just as the brothers notice that lanterns are approaching, swinging ominously through the dark.

Especially engrossing are Cat's adventures on the road--belting out raunchy songs with a pack of drunken soldiers, murmuring flirtation with Diane, a savvy young barmaid with piercing "triangular" eyes, flinging a hand-grenade which nearly explodes in his face.

As in The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' documentary of the French Occupation, the novel's barrage of impressions and opinions assaults, even implicates, the reader. Derisive voices chant an anti-Vichy song. A housewife prepares makeshift tea out of water and carrot tops. The odor of filth rises from the streets. Meanwhile, the heated voices of a cautious bourgeois and a young radical debate questions that offer no moral answers.

DESPITE ITS energetic style, however, Cat's Grin has some problems of structure and voice. Perhaps because of his background as a journalist, Maspero feels compelled to tell all. Jarringly, he departs from Cat's limited point of view to give the reader information which the thirteen-year-old could not possibly perceive.

He traces Cat's every moment--the sparsely narrated action scenes of the book are interrupted by long sections during which Maspero has Cat meditate on what he has learned and who he has become. None of these sections quite rings true--they are too pat and preachy, as in Cat's huffy rejection of the pallid values of his aunt and uncle:

What they say about him does not matter....He knows that the things tht really deserve to be fought for exist, he will spend his whole life finding them and defending them if he has to. He is sure Antoine would agree.

The mediocre translation by Nancy Amphoux does not curb the book's tendency to ramble. Nevertheless Cat's Grin is an evocative novel about a time in history which many French would prefer to forget.

Maspero introduces the book with a quotation from Alice in Wonderland, in which the Cheshire Cat vanishes except for his grin. In the same way, Cat grins on, even as his hope for his family dwindles and he remains alone and cynical, keeping up the empty pretense of being a child.

As he continues to grin, to fool those who watch him, his substance disintegrates and melts away. As Alice exclaims, "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin...but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I've ever seen in my life!"