A Ra(n)t Review

Have you ever hated a book so much you didn’t even want to be associated with it?

A few weeks ago, I picked up City of Rats while on a bookish jaunt with a friend. (I’m not naming the bookstore or the friend, because no one needs to be more connected to this novel than they already are.) An X-rated fable? Dirty Ratatouille? Sentient Parisian rats, going on surrealist adventures? Say less!

Friends, the book was none of those things.

I knew I was in trouble when I saw it had a 3.09 average rating on Goodreads, but I thought maybe it was just “weird” in a way people weren’t vibing with. I figured I’d either love or it would be a solid “well, THAT happened” two- or three-star kind of read. But then I started skimming some of the bad reviews——one of my favorite pastimes——and saw repeated mentions to a scene so depraved, people stopped reading.

At this point, it was last Sunday night, and I had already started reading the book after finishing The Mad Wife right before bed. I told myself again that maybe people were overreacting. And if they weren’t, I could just stop reading.

Oh, stop reading I did, dear reader.

The book started out fine. A rat is writing letters to a human, which have now been “translated” by the author, Copi. The rat is living it up in the Catacombs with his bud, selling worms to the pigeons. Fantastic! It wasn’t quite as fun as I had hoped, but at the start, I was charmed by the dynamics of the rat world and their use of human detritus to build their lives. (Their worm shop was made out of an egg carton! Come on, that’s adorable!!)

(Spoilers and very serious trigger warnings for rape and child sexual abuse. Skip the next three paragraphs to avoid the discussion of what actually happened in the book.)

Then there was a weird double-date scene with the main rat and his friend, where they had sex with two lady rats in the middle of dinner, and then the lady rats claimed they’d been raped? But it was played as a joke, and their mom just said they would all get married now?? Off-putting and not funny at all by my standards, but I belatedly realized the book had been published in 1979 (and also the author is a man), so, I don’t know, different times? I still didn’t like it and some of the other commentary, but I figured I could push through the 100ish pages and call this a wash.

And then a two-year-old child was introduced and, for some reason, we get an incredibly graphic sexual abuse scene with an adult man?? And it’s narrated by the rats, who don’t totally get what’s going on, so it’s also played for confusion/laughs?? It was so much worse than I expected from the hints on Goodreads, and just . . . what the actual fuck???

And apparently it gets worse, if I’m reading these reviews correctly????

(End of spoilers and potentially triggering discussions.)

So I quietly closed the book on the LIRR (because, yes, I was reading this garbage in public) and sat in stunned silence the rest of the ride home.

I understand satire. I understand using a new point-of-view or an absurdist lens to tackle the truly disgusting things humans do to each other in this world. But I would argue this book is not a successful satire——or fable, as it claimed to be——because it feels more like those scenes are played for shock value rather than to make a point. What was I possibly meant to take away from this?

I also think the back cover copy is wildly misleading, making the book sound like an edgy, ratty romp around Paris. And, sure, it starts that way, but there should be some warning of what’s to come. Weird and confusing, I can handle. Genuinely horrific, I cannot.

I don’t know what else happens in the book or how it ends, and will not be going back to it to find out. But now here’s my dilemma:

What the fuck do I do with this book?

On Goodreads, I originally marked it as my first official DNF, but I then decided I didn’t even want to have my name or profile associated with it, so I removed it from my shelves entirely. But I still have the physical copy. I don’t really want to resell it or donate it anywhere, because I don’t want to subject someone else to it. I don’t want to stick it in a Little Free Library for the same reason. I also really don’t want this fucking book on my shelves, or even anywhere near my person.

Do I throw it out? Do I bury it somewhere and let someone unearth it in a couple decades like a royally fucked time capsule? As one of the Goodreads reviewers said, “This book genuinely makes me question my stance on book bans.” Like, that’s a bit extreme, because I do unfortunately still think everyone can write and publish and read whatever they want. 

But then I also have the right to write an angry blog post about it, and to maybe throw the book off a cliff.