Peter Rühmkorf: Meeting up in Kenilworth. A fairy tale

Peter Rühmkorf
Meeting up in Kenilworth. A fairy tale

fiction, cats

184pp (22,000 words)

Are there ghosts in England? Are there ever! Jam McDamn, senior curator at Kenilworth, never lets a guided tour go by without drawing attention to Kenilworth's resident ghost. Whether his cat Minnie believes in ghosts is less clearcut.

The ghost, grown more and more doddery with each passing century but provoked beyond endurance by McDamn, rouses himself one dull November evening to work the miracle and make the magic spell come true: »Ginger puss, you will now become a human and live henceforth as a young maid, and you, McDamn, will be transformed into a tomcat and roam abroad for the rest of your life.«

How will these unequal creatures cope? Will they ever find each other again? And which of them - the transmuted tom or the feline maiden - will prove able to adjust to their new life?

Rights sold

Latvia – Apgads Mansards

Previous editions (rights reverted)
Taiwan (Chinese complex) - Asian Culture
audio book - Jumbo
paperback - Insel

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Reviews

»Rühmkorf’s fairy tales are spun of anarchic, poetic yarn, full of breezing sentences, racy adventures, and bold disenchantments; (...) Rühmkorf has read and studied the ›merry science‹ of fairy tales for years. As a reader, you can tell that here is someone who knows his subject well, and this is precisely why he is so delightfully able to continue and at the same to subvert this ancient art. (...) Reading Rühmkorf is pure aesthetic delight, the most sophisticated seduction, and a reminder of what a glorious instrument language can be.«
Gabriele von Arnim, Die Welt

»Rühmkorf’s most brilliant fairy story, exuberant with ideas and puns, a wonderfully intricate literary fairy-tale in the tradition of Hoffmann and Tieck.«
Der Freitag

»Here was an iridescent cat piece of brilliant linguistic virtuosity, a tale of unique quality like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tom-Cat Murr, a work of outstanding reflection written in a musical, most detailed and precise language that went far beyond the mediocrity of the Hobbits, Momos and Neverending Stories hitherto embraced by millions of readers. In his tenderly surreal and contrast-seeking adventure, Rühmkorf managed to keep the delicate balance between free will, hindrance and subtlety, spectacularly sweeping from the arena the more loud-mouthed examples of fantastic literature.«
Frankfurter Rundschau

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