Cepillar al gato

Who writes about the desires of older women? Who dares to speak of pleasure, love, sex —of the body that still burns and trembles— beyond seventy? Jane Campbell does, with a brilliant, mischievous, melancholic, and fiercely lucid voice. And she does so for the first time at eighty, with this collection of stories hailed in the UK as a revelation, instantly establishing her as the heir to Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, or even Daphne du Maurier. In the thirteen stories of Brushing the Cat —including the title story, a small gem about the touch of a feline tongue and the memory of desire— there are women who fall in love with other women, there are nursing homes where the spark of love ignites, there are worn bodies that recover tenderness, excitement, and rage. There is humor, there is poetry, there are epiphanies that sting.