The Cat and the Tiger by Maia Varsimashvili-Raphael: book review

The Cat and the Tiger: Tales from Georgia by Maia Varsimashvili-Raphael (French edition 2011 – Le Chat et Le Tigre) is a collection of fables all set in the country of Georgia.

There are five tales:

La puce et la formi – The Flea and the Ant

Le chat et le tigre – The Cat and the Tiger

L’ours, le loup et le renard – The Bear, the Wolf and the Fox

Une poignée et demie – A Handful and a Half

Le trois conseils de sagesse – The Three Counsels of Wisdom.

Like all fables, each one begins with, ‘Once upon a time …’

And like all fables, there is a lovely lesson – although, some moral lessons are less ‘lovely’ and are quite cruel, but so were the Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm!

The characters – animals that speak or stereotypical humans – are oafish and unreasonable, wise and foolish, honest and dishonest, good and bad, rich and poor, fulfilled and disappointed, powerful and subservient.

An ant falls into the water; what will the flea do to save it? A tiger and a cat meet at the edge of a wood; what do they say to each other?

The fables delightfully blend reality with imagination. The author invites readers to ‘try to enter the universe where all these adventures really happened and where nothing ever happened.’

The Cat and the Tiger: Tales from Georgia is a short 63 pages, easy to read, and nicely illustrated by the author – even allowing the reader to colour in the drawings!

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.

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