“Vote for me—because I’m less likely to ruin your life!”

akihiko kaji from given

This complex, truly wild fiction, created in the mid-1800's, is the autobiography of the tomcat Murr, written on the backs of the pages of a manuscript he has clawed to pieces. Interspersed with Murr's musings is the biography of Kappelmester, Johannes Kreisler, Murr's owner. Kreisler was the pseudonym under which ETA Hoffmann published his brilliant critical essays on music, and Murr was the real name of his cat. Through these two entities, he pieced together the fragments of his own shattered psyche and commented on the relationship of art and artists to society

• “Murr’s wilful destruction of Kreisler’s book, by which his work becomes a palimpsest, signals the novel’s fascination with reflections and plagiarism. This is also evident in the innumerable quotations from Goethe, Shakespeare, Mozart and many others.
• Literature arises through a dialogue with earlier art, being both imitation and aesthetic cannibalism.

• “The protagonists prove to be opposites, too, Murr (Noé-ish) being the lovable cat, a calm, integrated, vain, self-satisfied and confident bourgeois who enjoys an unproblematic relation to his comrades and the opposite sex. (Alright the opposite sex bit barely applies sexually or romantically, but there is an air of innocence that is familiar.).
• Kreisler (Vanitas-like) by contrast, is the neurasthenic, anguished genius, unable to find a niche in society or to satisfy his desires; an artist whose wildly pendular moods swing between radical extremes, from the plainly ridiculous to the loftily sublime.”

• “The novel’s two halves are linked by Master Abraham, Murr’s owner and Kreisler’s mentor."
• “The mysterious, Faust-like magus Master Abraham is closely associated with his machines and curiosities, like his ‘marine trumpet’.

• "As in a human Bildungsroman, the story relates how the cat repeatedly succumbs to delusion and reawakens to higher knowledge. "

• “Personality seems unstable. The self seems liable to split and confront its doppelgänger, being at the mercy of strange outer forces or inner impulses.
• Thus the plot demonstrates the intricate but fragile bond that unifies the human family, a family which seems to be acting out its fate as mechanically as one of Master Abraham’s gadgets.”

• “The structure of the novel plays fickle games with time. The Murr action lasts only a few months and occurs chronologically in the interval between the first and last Kreisler chapters.
• Chronologically, the first Kreisler fragment in the novel actually follows the last: at the end, Master Abraham invites Kreisler to the celebrations he describes at the beginning.

• “Linear time belongs to rationality and cannot encompass the ultimate truths the novel seeks to convey"
• “The Kreisler narrative is thus entrapped in circularity.”
• “When we eventually discover the Kreisler story’s reverse chronology, we ourselves begin to enter time’s infinite loop, approaching the absolute to which Kreisler aspires, where past, present and future merge as one.”

• “ Humour and irony themselves engage in a dialectic. Irony – the novel’s constant weapon – exposes the negative.
• Humour reveals the positive, and entails the acceptance of, and thereby the elevation above, negativity.

• “The spiritual realm beyond appearances frequently makes itself felt among the characters. Dreams, strange affinities, correspondences, animal magnetism and electric shocks all point to the existence of an arcane region, beyond empirical fact.

• Hoffman's cat died before he completed the second volume, and the he died before he completed the third volume. His protagonist was supposed to have a happy ending - but there was no ending instead
• “Ironically, Murr’s death means that his well-planned book will remain a fragment. His papers will instead be inserted into the hitherto fragmentary Kreisler tale. In a further irony, it now seems that the Kreisler story is destined for completion.” but wasn't because the author died.

Cherry Blossom: “Transience of life”: make an edit about a character you think has incomparable beauty.