My Beloved Monster, Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat who Rescued Me by Caleb Carr
As I began this saga of man and cat, I kept wondering what seemed so familiar in the style. I had read other books by Caleb, but that familiarity was not it. I also found myself hearing the text in the voice of Vincent Price. At first, I thought that the style was perhaps Sir Conan Doyle’s but no, that was not quite it. It was the subject – someone seeking communication with an alien being and the rounding out of paragraphs with a mystery. Then it hit me. It was the style of Mary Shelley in Frankenstein; this notion made me take a new look at the title. This monster, however, was not of the author’s making. It was a cat, and as the story progressed, the contact was made between man and feline and the tone changed to the most tender of love stories. “Beloved” overtakes “monster” by a thousand miles.
The title actually comes from a song, “My Beloved Monster,” by Mark O. Everett and sung by the Eels, which Caleb quotes:
She will always be the only thing
That comes between me and the awful sting
That comes from living in a world
That's so damn mean
Both Caleb and Masha, the cat, know more than anyone should about the meanness of this world. Masha’s previous owners left her alone in an abandoned apartment to die of starvation and loneliness. Caleb was so badly abused by his sadistic father that he suffered health issues his whole life. Damage from having been thrown repeatedly down staircases could not be fully repaired.
This book is the memoir of the seventeen-year relationship between Caleb and Masha. Having made some money from his best seller, the Alienist, Caleb buys a mountain in the Adirondacks and builds a dream house. The impetuous, beautiful, and wild Masha fills the house with adventure. For much of the book, I thought that Caleb was projecting his own wishes and feelings into the cat. Over time, I became convinced that he was carefully reading the cat’s signals and that he was not mistaken in finding empathy, worry, and love in Masha’s behavior. It is not that he makes of Masha something she isn’t. Rather he takes careful note of who she is and finds her to be enough.
All cats and men are mortal, and so the sadness of mortality hangs over this work. Caleb and Masha both suffer from similar ailments and find ways to comfort each other through painful health crises. Masha has terrifying, near-death encounters in the wild, surviving and triumphing in a combat with a bear. She also is badly injured by a fisher, an animal I had never heard of but looks to be a large and ferocious weasel. The book was published a few months before Caleb’s death, and he can be seen online, in a prepublication interview, confessing that Masha was the love of his life.
I am saddened that his voice will no longer be heard. I loved the three novels I have already commented on. This book was his final act of generosity. Like those Japanese artisans who mended broken bowls with molten gold, Caleb has made something beautiful out of the brokenness he endured.
