City of Rats - Kit Schluter, César Aira

Life isn't easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Raka, he's got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, an-as spring blooms in the City of Lights-a budding love interest. But after a double date goes horribly wrong, Gouri and Raka, along with the royal Rat Court-the princesses Iris and Catarina, and their hilariously unpredictable mother, the Queen of Rats-find themselves adrift on the Seine, accessories after the fact to a double homicide, using their new ally, a small human child, as a life raft. From there, the hijinks metastasize. French police collar the gang along with Mimile, a sadistic murderer who never remembers his crimes. But having escaped lock-up (from the cell they'd been tossed into with their arch-enemies, a snake and a terrier), they pay a visit to the God of Man (a homeless recluse hiding out in the Sainte-Chapelle), but then the giant Rat Devil makes his appearance, full of fiery flatulence and threatening cataclysm...Told in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable where his high-velocity prose smashes through societal taboos—moral, sexual, or otherwise—like a bullet train hitting a glass house. Whimsical, smutty, and surprisingly profound, City of Rats will leave no reader unscathed, and every reader awestruck.