by Esmerelda Pink
It’s difficult to know where to begin with The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures, the fourth novel by the notoriously elusive G.L. Pumpernickel, whose previous works include I Married a Traffic Cone and The Eggs Were All Named Kevin. While the title suggests a whimsical caper involving feline finance, what unfolds instead is a genre-defying meditation on ambition, lactose, and the fragility of speculative markets in Western economies.
The titular cat, Whiskers von St. André, is a former alley-dweller turned lactose magnate who, in a society suspiciously resembling post-Brexit Luxembourg, pioneers the concept of cheese futures: trading dairy commodities based not on current availability, but on the predicted emotional needs of cheese-loving marsupials. It sounds implausible, but in Pumpernickel’s hands it becomes entirely,almost disturbingly,credible.
Pumpernickel’s prose is as dense and crumbly as a Wensleydale left too long on a windowsill. Sentences unfurl like legal contracts drafted under duress, interrupted by footnotes, parentheses, and the occasional line of free verse. Yet somehow, amid this syntactic rococo, emerges a story that is both oddly tender and slyly cutting.
Consider the opening line:
“There was cheddar, cheddar without regulation; the rats were pleased.”
From there, we plunge into Whiskers’ rise through the shadowy world of dairy speculation, guided by a mysterious mentor known only as The Fromageur and opposed by the villainous Chairman Squeak, who seeks to destabilize the soft cheese index for reasons of personal vengeance and lactose intolerance. Along the way, Whiskers must navigate feline identity politics, existential dread, and a romantic subplot involving a sentient brie named Clothilde.
It would be easy to dismiss the novel as a surrealist romp or a particularly strange bet lost at a dinner party. But beneath its silliness lies a surprisingly coherent critique of capitalism’s insatiable need for abstraction. Cheese, in this novel, is not merely a commodity,it is a metaphor for trust, nourishment, and the illusion of permanence in an ever-curdling world.
And it’s not without heart. Whiskers, for all his transactional cunning, is a deeply insecure protagonist, haunted by dreams of being replaced by a genetically modified goat and driven by a desperate need to matter,to be more than “just another mouser in a pinstripe cravat.” His climactic monologue at the Cheese Summit of Greater Dijon is absurd and moving in equal measure:
“We are all, in the end, coagulations of desire. The milk of ambition curdles. And what remains but the hope that someone,somewhere,will spread us on toast?”
Some readers will, understandably, find The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures bewildering, if not actively unhinged. There are charts where there shouldn’t be charts, recipes that double as allegories, and one particularly difficult chapter written entirely in financial slang.
But those willing to lean into its strange genius will discover a novel that is far more than the sum of its gimmicks. G.L. Pumpernickel has crafted a book that is as intelligent as it is idiotic, as philosophical as it is feline. It will not change your life, but it might change how you look at a wedge of Gruyère,and possibly how you read your investment portfolio.
In short: utterly ridiculous. Highly recommended.
