If Cats Disappeared from the World

This book had a nice, quirky concept but its execution was weak.

Our protagonist is informed of his impending death and offered a deal with the devil: for every extra day he is alive, he needs to choose something that will totally disappear from the world. From this setup, I was expecting to read heart-wrenching moral dilemmas about the ethics of making things disappear for the whole world while wanting to eke out a few more moments out of life. I also thought I would be getting a deep exploration of grief when confronted so directly with one's own mortality. Instead, it was pretty blah.

The main character is selfish and apathetic and doesn't seem to consider any opinions, thoughts or feelings outside of his own when choosing the things that can disappear. Granted, by the end, the devil is the one choosing which things disappear (no surprise here, he is the devil after all). However, even then he should have considered what it would mean when he accepted the bargain. For example, when he is considering whether or not to make movies disappear, he doesn't seem to think about what that absence would mean for his ex-girlfriend - who loves movies so much she now lives above a cinema. What would the absence of movies mean for her? Will she forever feel incomplete? He neither considers no cares about what the answers to these questions are. The protagonists self-centredness would be okay if the book was seeking to highlight how inherently selfish humans really are, but by the end, we are supposed to buy the idea that humans are actually selfless because the protagonist cannot bring himself to make cats disappear. However, even that final decision is selfish, he doesn't decide to keep cats around because he's thinking of other people, he seems to do it because of the sentimental value cats hold for him . Besides, he hardly seems remorseful for the other things he made disappear.

Additionally, there seem to be no real-world implications for the things that disappear. How did the world not come grinding down to a halt when the clocks disappeared. What happened to all the people who worked in phone manufacturing, or in the movie industry, or even in the clock industry. Millions of people must supposedly have woken up unemployed. How did the world simply go on, when big changes had been made. I think this concept would have worked better if each bargain gave him an additional 2 months - 1 year, then he could really sit with and consider the impacts of his decisions, see how the world was different because of the self-interested choices he had made.

This book promised to deliver one man's journey of self-discovery, but in my opinion, it fell short.