The Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perisic

Cats confused people. Not just those on the island who had never seen the animals, but also the Greeks who had taken them from the Egyptians--because that was not long ago, they were not used to them yet. They were the first ungovernable animals that made friends with the humans. When humans stood before cats, they did not see their own purpose.

In ancient Syracuse, a slave boy named Kalia becomes attached to a cat named Miu. Miu is a novelty among the Greeks, a strange creature brought from Egypt, where it's rumored they worship this strange, aloof creature. Miu is badly mistreated by the son of Kalia's owner, and the stark contrast between the freedom in the cat's bearing and Pigras' controlling nature awakens Kalia to the injustice of his own state as a slave. Hiding out in a barn, he ends up absconding on a ship with Miu--and a donkey named Mikro--on its way to the Adriatic coast, where Sicilian Greek settlers intend to set up a new polis. Kalia, Miu, and Mikro all become founding members of this new city, and it is through this new enterprise that Kalia comes to understand the nature of political and social life.

The third-person Kalia sections are interspersed with first-person observations by "Scatterwind," a creature who is made of the wind, if such a thing can be possible--even Scatterwind admits that to use the term "I" seems a bit out of place. Scatterwind, a relative perhaps of the bag of winds that sent Odysseus' men scrambling across the Mediterranean, is a keen observer of human (and animal) life. Because he is immortal, or at least long lived, he looks down at Kalia and the building of the polis with a kind of bird's-eye view that allows him to understand better how it expresses the nature of humans to collaborate and contest. Much of human behavior is inexplicable to Scatterwind, and his theories don't always pass muster: his accounting for love, for instance, emerges from the need for energy in the form of heat. And yet, his perspective puts the travails of one slave, one cat, and one donkey into a larger context of human flourishing and behavior.

The Scatterwind sections are, I think, the most novel and effective part of A Cat at the End of the World. I enjoyed the story of Kalia escaping with Miu, and the way that the plight of the domestic animals helps him understand his own place in the world and expand his sense of humanity and justice. The novel loses its energy a little, I think, as soon as the boat arrives on the Illyrian coast. There are excellent elements, great characters--the obsessive city planner whose exile from his polis is tantamount to a death sentence, the gruff-with-a-heart-of-gold former soldier missing an arm--but not having the wider perspective of a Scatterwind, I had trouble understanding the dynamic of the city's growth and the conflicts inherent to it. Kalia grows, becomes an adult, obtains a wife and has children, but these things are, even in a 400 page book, zoomed through so hastily I had a hard time integrating them to the story as a reader. But through it all there is Miu, the refugee, whose proud independence and nobility serve as a counterweight to shifting allegiances and philosophies.

With the addition of Croatia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 111!