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Care of Wooden Floors
Will Wiles
2012, 295 pages
Fiction
A British copywriter stays at his composer friend Oskar’s elegant, ultramodern, apartment in a glum Eastern European city. The instructions are simple: feed the cats, don’t touch the piano and make sure nothing hurts the priceless wooden floors.
Believing a change of scene will help him write better, he agrees to housesit for his friend. Upon arrival he notes the cats sleeping on the sofa and a bottle of red wine on the table with a list of further instructions. Reading this list, he learns that the cats can be on the bed but not on the sofa. Why he wonders, when they definitely seem to prefer the sofa?
The reason becomes apparent soon enough as the situation in and out of the apartment spirals out of control and more notes appear. During the course of a week both the apartment and the narrator’s sanity fall apart.
This is a first novel for the author. Some of the words are overused and the first 100 pages are slow but necessary for character development. There are several laugh-out-loud moments of dark humor and some quietly profound thoughts that make this book a wonderful read.
