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The Man Who Loved Dogs: A Novel, by Leonardo Padura
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A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940
In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader.
The story revolves around Iván Cárdenas Maturell, who in his youth was the great hope of modern Cuban literature―until he dared to write a story that was deemed counterrevolutionary. When we meet him years later in Havana, Iván is a loser: a humbled and defeated man with a quiet, unremarkable life who earns his modest living as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine. One afternoon, he meets a mysterious foreigner in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. This is "the man who loved dogs," and as the pair grow closer, Iván begins to understand that his new friend is hiding a terrible secret.
Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Ramón's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. This is a story about political ideals tested and characters broken, a multilayered epic that effortlessly weaves together three different plot threads― Trotsky in exile, Ramón in pursuit, Iván in frustrated stasis―to bring emotional truth to historical fact.
A novel whose reach is matched only by its astonishing successes on the page, The Man Who Loved Dogs lays bare the human cost of abstract ideals and the insidious, corrosive effects of life under a repressive political regime.
- Sales Rank: #697701 in Books
- Published on: 2014-01-28
- Released on: 2014-01-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.17" h x 1.74" w x 6.43" l, 1.83 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 592 pages
Review
“Padura has written a historical novel of Tolstoyan sweep. The bonus thrill stems from knowing that this horrific tale--and most of its characters--are all too true . . . in The Man Who Loved Dogs, Padura attempts nothing less than an inquest into how revolutionary utopias devolve into totalitarian dystopias. At the same time, he has written an irresistible political crime thriller--all the more remarkable considering that we know the ending before we crack open this 576-page tome. The Man who Loved Dogs, beautifully rendered into English by Anna Kushner, is an exhaustively reported work, chockablock with history--from the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism and Stalin's show trials to the steely suffocation of post-Castro Cuba . . . A carefully crafted web of relationships threaded through Padura's characters drives this complex . . . narrative . . . Like fellow novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Padura writes along the razor's edge. In his detective novels, he cagily navigated a quasi-permissible space, but in The Man Who Loved Dogs (first published in Spain in 2009), he finally lets it rip. Although Fidel Castro is never mentioned by name, his creation--the Cuban revolution--is rendered here as a crumbling tropical gulag. It is a calculated risk by Padura, a keen student of Cuban chess, and one based on the fact that there is a wider opening today than ever before on the island since the revolution. Moreover, as Cuba's greatest living writer and one who is inching toward the pantheon occupied by Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Padura may well now be untouchable.” ―Ann Louise Bardach, The Washington Post
“The word ‘ambitious' is often reviewerspeak for ‘long,' and the novel is indeed that, at more than 550 pages. The word also can also imply the failure of a book to live up to its own expectations, but here that is not the case. Padura, who first conceived of the story while the Berlin Wall still stood, somehow manages to impose a riveting narrative form on what would otherwise be a textbook-level treatise on the rise and schism of international communism and how it has reverberated through the years to inform the lives of those still under its rule . . . Padura puts a human face on what might have otherwise been a stale chess match of ideology . . . wonderful translation by Anna Kushner supports the grand structure of the book, while maintaining Padura's complex and muscular prose. He writes the sort of sentences that require confidence in the political import of literature, which we so rarely see these days in American authors . . . For an author who lives and writes in the intensely censorious Cuba, the publishing of this book represents not only an impressive artistic achievement but also an act of bravery.” ―Nicholas Mancusi, The Miami Herald
“If Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera turned the romance novel into literature, and Mario Vargas Llosa, with Conversation in the Cathedral, applied French 1950s nouveau roman techniques to the political thriller, the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, known for detective thrillers, has made his entrance to the Latin American Modernist canon by writing a Russian novel . . . Its Russian quality comes not only from its length--almost 600 pages--and the fact that it returns constantly to Moscow, but also from its Tolstoyan passion for historical trifles and Dostoyevskyan pleasure in examining the moral life of its characters . . . Mr. Padura's novel tells [a] triple story without ever abandoning the general conventions of fiction. More concerned with the emotional life of its characters than with their historical roles, the novel still imparts a sense of reality, thanks to its deft handling of an astonishing quantity of information about Trotsky and Mercader's lives . . . The three alternating stories resonate with one another, acquiring deeper meaning as they paint the complete fresco of a political paradigm's downfall. Mr. Padura suggests that his three main characters, though playing very different roles, end up victims of the machinations of a system that discards them when they stop being useful . . . Ms. Kushner's rendering of the novel in English brilliantly demonstrates her loyalty to the author's voice. She nudges the English to give it a Cuban tone, respectful of the brutal efficiency of Mr. Padura's Spanish, while never sacrificing the lyrical flourishes with which he occasionally bedazzles his readers.” ―Alvaro Enrigue, The New York Times
“Spy-novel clichés and hard-boiled dialogue . . . keep the pages of The Man Who Loved Dogs turning . . . tension builds toward a dramatic climax that helps to make his novel a rewarding read.” ―Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Wall Street Journal
“In this ambitious, at times gripping work of historical fiction, Padura re-creates the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The novelist draws a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the outcast Bolshevik, hounded by Joseph Stalin. Padura's Trotsky is arrogant and intransigent but also extraordinarily resilient and industrious in exile, self-critical and prescient, and emotionally devoted to his loving wife and children . . . Padura laments the . . . snuffing out of credulous dreams of Cuban revolutionaries but notes that the Soviet Union collapsed when the terror and lies began to subside. It is not clear whether the novelist foresees the same fate for Cuba.” ―Foreign Affairs
“Padura is one of Cuba's leading writers, and this massive novel must be his masterpiece; it's a brilliant, multi-layered examination of 20th-century history . . . With equal assurance and brio, Padura travels between Stalin's Moscow, the Mexico of Frida Kahlo, and Spain and France in the turbulent years between the wars, to engineer an epic of lost illusions. Magnificent.” ―Kate Saunders, The Times (London)
“The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Cuban author Leonardo Padura, is a stunning novel, chronicling the evisceration of the Communist dream and one of the most "ruthless, calculated and useless" crimes in history. Spanning wide tracts of the globe, sweeping through some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century and interweaving the lives of three wildly different characters, this monumental, intricately structured work recounts the events that lay behind the assassination of Lev Davidovich Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 . . . It is a measure of Padura's humanity and skill as a novelist that the reader can at times empathise with all three [central] characters despite their cruel actions and manifest flaws.” ―John Thornhill, The Financial Times
“Cuban writer Padura delivers a complex, every deepening tale of politics and intrigue worthy of Alan Furst or Roberto Bolaño . . . Long but without excess; philosophically charged but swiftly moving. A superb intellectual mystery.” ―Kirkus (starred)
“For some time, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura has been exploring his disenchantment with many of the realities of his beloved county through his novels about detective Mario Conde. But it is in his The Man Who Loved Dogs, just published in English, where his social and political reflections about socialism and freedom--in Cuba and beyond--reach their greatest depth . . . Contrary to the stereotype of robot-like Communists, Padura presents a nuanced view of a range of Communist personalities . . . Padura, living under Cuba's sort of Communism . . . highlights Trotsky as a literary critic who affirms, without hesitation, that ‘everything is permitted in art.' . . . Leonardo Padura is one of the principal representatives of a new intellectual and cultural ambience in the island that support the liberalization and democratization of Cuban society. But he is in a unique position in the Cuban system: though tolerated and even feted, his most critical work has not been made available to the broad public . . . The Cuban government wants to have its cake and eat it too: to relax some political controls and at the same time prevent the spread of ideas that may subvert its monopoly of power. Padura hasn't been censored or repressed by the Cuban government. But similar to his narrator Iván, he has been made to matter much less than he should.” ―Samuel Farber, Jacobin Magazine
“The man who loved dogs, in Cuban author Padura's (Havana Gold) epic novel, is Jaime Lopez, an elderly Spaniard living in '70s Havana who claims to have been a friend of the man who assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. An accomplished braiding of history and fiction, the novel follows three attenuated strands. The first is the story of Iván Cárdenas Maturell, a politically incorrect Cuban writer who befriends the dog-loving Lopez. The second is an account of Trotsky's life in exile, from Turkey and France to Norway, and, finally, Mexico, where he's welcomed by his good friends, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And the third traces the radicalization of Ramón Mercader, who joins the Communist Party in Spain in the '30s and is trained as a Soviet assassin. The novel dramatizes the long, slow collision course of Trotsky and Mercader. It also details Ivan's relationship with Lopez and the ultimate revelation about his identity. Padura's novel encompasses nothing less than a history of international communism after the 1917 Revolution. The story goes from the scorched earth of Spain in the 1930s, to the political hotbed that was Mexico in the 1940s, to Moscow during the Prague Summer of 1968, to Havana from the '70s to the near present, where we learn of Ivan's ultimate ironic fate, leaving the reader with the exhilarating feeling of having just experienced three entire lives.” ―Publishers Weekly
“The Man Who Loved Dogs is an excellent novel, rich in suggestions about the human condition and about our world that go beyond straight narrative history.” ―Ricardo Senabre, El Mundo
“A novel of great force, and Padura's best . . . [It] has great human density and an intense narrative dynamic.” ―J. A. Masoliver Rodenas, La Vanguardia
About the Author
Leonardo Padura was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1955. A novelist, journalist, and critic, he is the author of several novels, two volumes of short stories, and several nonfiction collections. His novels featuring the detective Mario Conde have been translated into many languages and have won literary prizes around the world. The Man Who Loved Dogs was a finalist for the Book of the Year Award in Spain. Padura lives in Havana.
Anna Kushner was born in Philadelphia and first traveled to Cuba in 1999. She has translated the novels of Guillermo Rosales, Norberto Fuentes, and Gonçalo M. Tavares.
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
If you want to be in politics and want to have a friend...get a dog !!!
By David Reskof
This is a wonderful story about the assignation of Leon Trotsky who was the rival and sworn enemy of Joseph Stalin. Apparently the author, Leonardo Padura, was born, raised and educated in Cuba during Fidel Castro's long lasting regime when orthodox Communist dogma was the only political idea available in Cuba. Madura seems during his life to have become slowly aware of the truth of the matter and utilizing the thinly veiled medium of the detective genre tells the story of his own enlightenment and of the life of the man who actually did kill Trotsky at the behest of Stalin personally. The story is a bit redundant and could have used some careful editing with regard to length and repetition. But, all in all it is very good and gripping in parts. David Reskof
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Sweeping, Satisfying, and Suspenseful.
By Dmitry Portnoy
Hindsight makes the past appear predictable. What could be more inevitable than what has already occurred? That is the big lie of history, filled with unlikely persons and developments, but embarrassed to admit it.
Literature doesn't have this problem. It restores the sense of surprise to events that were unbelievable when they happened. It can make history seem like fantasy or science fiction, which is how it feels as it unfolds. It exposes a truth whitewashed from chronicles chiseled in stone.
Old-fashionedly, yet freshly, "The Man Who Loved Dogs," whole-heartedly and un-self-preoccupiedly embraces its power as fiction. It revs up a turbo-charged narrative drive; culls the perfect details from the bin of minutiae to hang the story on and hook you in; weaves long, flexible, yet tightly focused sentences to funnel the complex feelings of its characters. And guiding it all a profound sense of shock the author's mastery impels upon the reader.
How could a math student build an army to overthrow a tzar, create an all-powerful government, yet be so blind to politics? How could an utterly improbable revolution happen again and again in different places? How could a swimmer just struggling not to drown turn the tides of history?
Read this book as the impossible epic fantasy-adventure it is, and marvel at the magic on every page.
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
A somewhat cynical novel about Leon Trotsky and his assassin
By Marc Lichtman
I mostly read non-fiction these days, and I got interested in reading Leonardo Padura because as a partisan of the Cuban Revolution, I'm interested in what Cubans are writing and reading, and he seems to be the most popular writer in Cuba. I love his Mario Conde novels; I view them less as detective stories than as social criticism, but the mystery form works well for him. I still have one to go. The fact that he is introducing Trotsky to Cuban readers is significant, but the real question is the form in which he's introduced. Someone I know who was at the recent Havana Book Fair said that Cuban Communists he knows who admire Trotsky are not thrilled with the book, although that may not be a representative sampling.
I like the form of this novel: The alternating stories of Trotsky; his assassin Ramón Mercader; and Padura's alter ego, the semi-fictional writer Iván Cárdenas, who meets Mercader in Cuba. The fact that the three stories aren't quite in sync with each other also makes it more interesting. It's starts out as quite an exciting novel, but soon moves into a slow, long narrative. What I like best about the Mario Conde novels is that while there isn't really a lot of action, the writing style makes me feel like I'm on a proverbial roller coaster ride. It's impossible for me to read them slowly. A lot more happens in this novel, but I found myself feeling bogged down in somewhat dull writing.
The New York Times review talks about "its Tolstoyan passion for historical trifles and Dostoyevskyan pleasure in examining the moral life of its characters." I have no pretensions to being a literary critic.
Padura did a lot of research for this novel, in a number of different countries. But while the only place I've been that Trotsky ever lived is where I live, New York, I believe I've read more Trotsky than Padura. Padura mentions some of his sources, through what Iván reads, and the fiction that someone left a copy of The Revolution Betrayed for Mercader in prison.
Sometimes historical fiction is pure conjecture, since we know little about the words spoken by historical figures. But sometimes we know a great deal. Padura uses some material directly from Trotsky (for example from Trotsky's Testament), but in other cases where Trotsky has given us (better) dialogue (as with Konrad Knudsen in Norway in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36)), Padura is likely unaware of it. What he was unaware of, and what he chose to change for his novel, one can only speculate on. In some cases it matters little; in other cases quite a bit.
Padura has Trotsky conversing with the Turkish fisherman Kharalambos, while in reality they had no language in common; an unimportant detail. But then Padura has Trotsky determined to write a biography of Stalin, while his publisher is intent on one about Lenin. In reality the exact opposite is true, and it does make a difference to the personality and politics of Trotsky.
I enjoyed the fictional meeting between George Orwell and Mercader in Spain, although I don't know if Orwell introduced himself to people by his pen name or his real name Eric Blair.
Most of what is true about Ramon Mercader comes from The Mind of an Assassin, and some dialogue is taken directly from words spoken or written by Trotsky's secretary Joseph Hansen, his wife Natalia Sedova, and from Sylvia Ageloff, who Mercader seduced for his assassination plans.
The historical novels I personally most like are ones like The Year of the French, where the major players of the Irish Revolution of 1798 are fairly minor characters in the novel, and the major characters are fictional. What you get through the fictional dialogue and the narrative is an impressive analysis of the contradictions within the ranks of the revolution, and a feel for what was going on. Even though I partially disagree with Thomas Flanagan, he gives a remarkable view of the failed revolution. Then there's Strumpet City, a novel about the Dublin Lockout of 1913. While labor leader Jim Larkin is portrayed through his actual words and deeds, and while his presence looms large, again, the main characters are fictional.
Padura portrays quite accurately the gangsterism of Stalinism; that's a strong point. But he has the Left Opposition led by Trotsky losing because of an error by Trotsky. Trotsky made plenty of errors, but none were decisive in this. The death of Lenin played a major role. The backwardness of Russia, the fact that socialist revolution in Germany didn't succeed, although it remained a very real possibility at least through 1923, the overthrow of the brief Soviet Republic in Hungary; these were far more important factors in what unfolded. The bureaucracy grew conservative, and developed the theory of "socialism in one country" using the Communist International simply as a means to carry out foreign policy of the USSR. The bureaucracy and the Communist Party grew through massive recruitment of opportunist job-seeking Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. It was less and less the party of Lenin. These are what mattered most, not a battle between two individuals.
Is the novel cynical? That's subject to interpretation, and different characters, including (semi?) fictional friends of the semi-fictional Iván Cárdenas represent somewhat different points of view. The main idea that I see is that there was a possibility of creating world socialism, which Padura calls "utopia," but it was lost, and that's the end of it. But then, that's how Padura sees Cuba also. He paints a true picture of it, but not the whole truth as I see it. Unlike the Soviet Union, where it vanished quite early, internationalism is still alive in Cuba. What they accomplished in Angola helped to free South Africa; that remains alive in Cuba, South Africa, and even here in the US. They send doctors all over the world, and teachers to many countries.
Some Cuban immigrants today are delighted when they see activity on behalf of the Cuban Five. Most Cuban-Americans at least support an end to the embargo. The capitalist press naturally pays more attention to the difficulties in Cuba than those of its colony Puerto Rico, where massive numbers are coming to the US, but they don't need a visa, and don't get characterized as political refugees.
Ultimately, the fate of the Cuban Revolution is tied to that of the world revolution. What exists today is very contradictory--one of the worst crises in the history of capitalism, but not yet massive response by the working class, although there are important struggles. Revolutionary parties are tiny in the few countries where they exist. But Stalinism was one of the greatest obstacles to revolution, and that's near its end. The working class will not play dead while their wages and social wages plummet, and jobs are fewer and fewer. I retain my revolutionary optimism.
For those interested in the life of Leon Trotsky, I first recommend My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography. The Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher (clearly used by Padura) remains the best biography, although it's at it's weakest point on Trotsky in Mexico. I dislike Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, but it does make extensive use of Joseph Hansen's archives, and that's worthwhile reading.
For understanding why Stalinism won, besides Revolution Betrayed I suggest reading Lenin's Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23, the three volume Challenge of the Left Opposition, and The Third International after Lenin.
And if you're interested in Trotsky on literature, read Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics, and Culture and Literature and Revolution.
08/05/2014. A friend of mine who also likes Padura as a writer, and reads him in Spanish thought I was not critical enough. He's right. The whole thing about Trotsky in his last exile plagued by doubts, haunted by the ghost of Kronstadt, had already been done to death in both fiction and "non-fiction." It has no resemblance to the actual revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
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