The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

There are, as Jeffrey Masson points out in his introduction to this book, about 5,000 books about cats in print. So, he asks, 'Why one more?'. The answer, evidently, is because the author feels that something is lacking in the many books he has read about cats and that something is a serious consideration of their emotional complexity. So far so good. There's still room in the world of books for a volume that will add insight to a pet that has been with us for at least 5,000 years. All that's required is a little honest observation, some solid research and a qualified, qualitative assessment of the cat/human cohabitation. Sadly none this of takes place. Adopting a simplistic approach to his prose interlaced by far too many bracketed comments Masson, from the outset, sets the tone of his work: 'Most cats (of mine, only Minna Girl is a partial exception) will not come when you call them, or rather, they will come sometimes, if they feel like it, and not other times, when they presumably don't feel like it (unless there are other factors, as yet unknown to us, that decide whether a cat comes or not).' This is the second paragraph of the opening chapter and it hardly gets better after that. To justify the title of his work Masson splits the chapters into Narcissism, Love, Contentment, Attachment, Jealousy, Fear, Anger, Curiosity and Playfulness. Plenty of scope to put in that honest observation one may feel. Except Masson is content to fill page after page with anecdotes that read along these lines: 'My friend Peter Thompson, a filmmaker and writer from Sydney, tells me that his father, the poet John Thompson, lost a cat in circumstances that confirm that cats can die of grief.' Indeed parts of the book deteriorate from an 'insightful' work in the hidden emotional lives of cats to diary entries focused on the trouble the author is having understanding one of his cats. By page 107 he appears to have given up gleaning any insights himself, let alone providing some for his readers, and the best he can come up with is the observation that 'Cats belong to a different species, and it will always remain impossible for us to be absolutely certain what the experience of jealousy is like for a cat.' This is an expensively packaged glossy hardback of the sort that plays on our love affair with the cat to produce the kind of impulse buy publishers make their money out of. You should resist the impulse to buy this book, unless you want to part with #16.99 in order to feel superior in knowledge, understanding and probably expression to the man who spent more than a year of his life writing it. (Kirkus UK)

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