I & Claudius: Travels With My Cat: Clare de Vries
Amazon.com Review
The question isn’t, “What happens when a young British woman travels the southern United States with a 19-year-old cat?” The question is, “What happens when bad-news-in-stiletto-heels Clare de Vries does that?” The answer is unbridled hilarity. Pushing 30, De Vries is wallowing in an emotional void from the recent death of her mother when she arrives on the East Coast with her cat Claudius, a shipped-over sports car, and a fantasy of finding happiness in America. Her dreams are continually smashed: the car breaks down, the cat soon follows, and felicity is elusive as she encounters some of the most wacked-out creatures to ever call George Washington their founding father. The feisty troublemaker gets booted out of hotels, museums, parks, and planes for traveling with her feline friend, and is a chronic magnet for weirdness, be it in the form of felons, con men, psychics, or ghosts. The absurdity that De Vries calls her on-the-road life reaches only one high point in Vegas, when disguised as Cleopatra she ditches a stranger from whom she inadvertently borrowed, and immediately lost, $5,000. Interspersed within the insane and sometimes harrowing escapades that unfold on her six-month road trek are touching emotional insights about pets, loved ones, and solo travel that fill out what might otherwise be simply an entirely entertaining albeit madcap book. Graphic, sometimes shocking, and sarcastically hip, this is not a book for your cat-loving grandmother, but a wild example of what might happen when a young, slightly neurotic female overdosing on chutzpah heads out (nearly) alone to shake boredom from her life. In that goal at least, De Vries unabashedly succeeds. –Melissa Rossi
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Twenty-nine-year-old de Vries always dreamed of driving across America, but she couldn’t bear to leave her beloved 19-year-old, toothless, chocolate-brown Burmese cat Claudius home alone in London. So, bucking conventional wisdom, she packed up ClaudeAand his water bowlAand flew with him across the Atlantic. Once in America, they encountered pet hair stylists in New York City, brown bears in the Smoky Mountains, psychic cowboys, the Grand Canyon, the lights of Las Vegas, and stars in Hollywood. Claude accompanies de Vries on many of her adventuresAbut he also spends a lot of time sleeping. Along the way, he has several illnesses that require veterinary attention; in order to survive these moments of panic, de Vries consoles herself by buying designer clothes and considering plastic surgery. The bond between the writer and her cat seems truly genuine, but do we really need to know all the details of de Vries’s angst about her wardrobe, her lack of a boyfriend, and her self-indulgent lifestyle? Her language, which ranges from British bawdy to downright trashy, adds nothing to her narrative. The moral is this: cats should be left at home, and this work is too uneven to be recommended.AEva Lautemann, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
$Order I & Claudius: Travels With My Cat: Clare de Vries From Amazon and save money$