A Tale of Two Lions

“My Dear Sister, I’m writing to warn you: Cattino—the cat who is soon to arrive at your house with my wife—is really a lion,” laments Count Lorenzaccio. Cunningly disguised as a housecat, Cattino is at home among the villas of the Italian gentry and has stolen the contessa’s heart. Meanwhile, in Nairobi, the dysfunctional Jeremiah is hired to don pith helmet and riding crop as a costumed museum guard. His ward? A stuffed lion named Pasha. But with his transfixing eyes and glare of “golden, liquid savagery,” Pasha soon reveals himself as a regal animal indeed, rousing himself and escaping into the night.

Ignacio Padilla declared this mischievous little novel to be “the best Mexican literary work I have read in recent years . . . [it] heralds a pen capable of that rarest of privileges in our letters: attaining the comic and profoundly human through a perfect simplicity.”

From a bold new voice in Spanish fiction—a sly and endearing novel.

Publishers Weekly

In Mexican writer Ransom's first novel to be published in English, a pet cat named Cattino may actually be a lion, while a stuffed lion named Pasha may actually be alive. The novel, divided into three stories, begins with "Cattino," in which an Italian count anxiously writes to warn his sister about her impending houseguests: his wife, Sophia, and her pet, "a minor god in a cage." Sophia's devotion to the cat-cum-lion drives the count mad with jealousy. "Jeremiah and the Lion," the second story, chronicles the travails of Jeremiah Jones, a Nairobi Ministry of Tourism employee, and reads like Knut Hamsun vamping on bureaucratic absurdity. Jeremiah is paid to dress up as a big-game hunter and guard Pasha, a stuffed and mounted lion. One day, Pasha disappears, and Jeremiah is suspected of fleeing with the lion, though Jeremiah insists Pasha "left of his own accord." Pasha and Cattino meet under unusual circumstances in the novel's concluding story. Line art accompanies the simple, fable-like prose, lending an air of whimsy to the feline antics. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Born in Mexico City, Roberto Ransom is of Irish and Irish American descent. He is the author of six other books in Spanish. This is his first work to be translated into English. He lives with his wife and three children in Chihuahua, Mexico.