MARIYANA REVIEW

This is a neatly written story which follows very closely the style, the setting and the characters in the original. Actually, the writer’s most noteworthy achievement is her way of preserving the minimalistic tone of Hemingway’s version.

However, there are hardly any changes to speak of. The only more significant alteration seems to concern the animal – the cat in the rain has become a puppy in the sun. Another modification: the American husband and wife have, for some reason, assumed names. Also, the husband is not reading a book but a gardening magazine, which is probably meant to trivialize the situation, and in this sense is a good idea.

Other than that, the closest the story comes to comic distortion (which is a very important aspect of what a parody is about) is George’s retort at his wife’s fuss over her hair: “I’ll buy you a wig”, said the husband unconcerned.

To cut a long story short, there is too much overlapping between Cat in the Rain and A Puppy in the Sun to call Mariyana’s endeavour a parody.

MILENA REVIEW

Ms Stoilova has based her parody on modifications of the setting of the original and some alterations in the female character’s personality. In this version, the American wife is more blatantly vain and naïve than Hemingway’s American wife. She is obsessed with making her girlfriends feel “green with envy” and she likes “the pink that the new Cosmo reported to be trendy this year”.

Also, her rhetoric is magisterially pro-occidental: she thinks of the Japanese as “small yellowish people”. It is in this culture gap that the humour constitutes itself. The American I-want-it-all-I want-it –now ethos is pitted against the Eastern respect for convention, and the situation is quite promisingly funny. The woman’s inability to make out why it wouldn’t be possible to have something if you pay for it opens up a goldmine of comic possibilities, which, I think, are not fully deployed. Actually, I would have extended the dialogue with the receptionist.

The part I enjoyed immensely is the one with the husband watching those “corpulent diaper-wrapped giants with female hairdos.” This moment reminded me of a chapter in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places where an American professor in England zaps through the channels in an attempt to find some American football and all he gets is a sequence of tedious sports like archery and soccer. If the writer had extended this paragraph, this could have made for some mighty good humour. Once again, I think, the comic potential could have been used more fully.

All in all, Ms Stoilova has done a good job of adhering to Hemingway’s economical style and she is quite good at manipulating the characters and the situation. And the “origami tree” at the end of the story is a killer of an idea. I would have appreciated a few more laughs, though.

SNEZHANA REVIEW

From the very beginning, Ms Bezus does a very good job of both following and straying (for comic effect) from Hemingway’s original. The artists with their easels, for example, are here replaced by “grannies …enjoying the buzzing of horse-flies around the toilets while trimming handkerchiefs with lace.” The artistic atmosphere of Hemingway’s Italian environment has given way to “the rural ambiance” of a provincial German town with all the kitsch that will, probably, go with it. The collocation “rural ambiance” itself is a winner, as the pretentiousness of the noun clashes with the down-to-earthness of the attribute. I would have trimmed some of the adjectives in this description, however. You may have noticed that Hemingway hates the accumulation of adjectives. So a sentence like “...a backyard equipped with fully functional authentic outdoor toilets dating from the early 19th century” doesn’t sound like Hemingway at all.

After this descriptive paragraph, the story keeps following the logic of the obverse and it actually goes from strength to strength. The American wife’s role is here taken over by a Japanese husband, who is after a rat rather than a cat, and who wants to kill it rather than hug it. The keeper is a cartoonish corpulent Frau, whose assistance in the pursuit of the rat adds a further touch of the absurd to the situation. To me, the ludicrous actually reaches its peak with the “large raindrop hanging from her pale Aryan nose”.

Then, the suddenly feminized Japanese husband, whose vanity is meant to repeat and pervert the American wife’s, is another brilliant idea. So is the abrupt switch to the guy’s belligerent mindset with: “I want this rat’s head on a silver plate. It’s my duty to offer it as a gift to my brave ancestors.” The ending, albeit a bit too bloody, is also appropriate in the context of a parody. The only detail I would slightly modify is the slip-stick comic moment when the German Frau pokes the husband’s behind with her umbrella. I found this a bit cheap.

Actually, what I liked most about the story is that it uses Hemingway’s text as a matrix which allows it to highlight and deliberately distort some cultural stereotypes. I was amused.

So, the Germans always win at the end of the day, right?