[D66] The Man Who loved Dogs

[A.O.]

https://www.bitterlemonpress.com/blogs/press-reviews/19951043-reviews-for-the-man-who-loved-dogs-by-leonardo-padura

“Even if it's a lie, we'll make it the truth,” declaims a character in
Leonardo Padura's monumental novel “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” “And that's
what matters.” ‘Focused on Stalin's murderous obsession with Leon
Trotsky, an intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution and the
founder of the Red Army, 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. Bottom of Form
Padura made his name writing an entertaining quartet of Chandleresque
detective novels set in Havana and featuring the erudite Lt. Mario
Conde. But 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. Indeed, it is Padura's careful reading
of Orwell's chronicle of the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia,”
that animates much of this tragic tale. A global epic set mostly in
Havana, Barcelona, Moscow and Mexico City, Padura's novel is grounded in
a trifecta of storylines: We have the grim saga of Trotsky's 11-year
flight from Stalin; the recruitment and creation of an assassin in the
form of Catalonian communist Ramón Mercader; and the marginalization of
Iván Cárdenas Maturell, a Cuban novelist who learns early in his career
the hazards of writing in his homeland. This unlikely trio of
world-weary cynics shares one passion: a fervid love of dogs. In 1977,
while running his Russian wolfhounds, or borzois, a breed that Trotsky
loves, Iván serendipitously meets the mysterious Mercader on a beach
outside Havana. A carefully crafted web of relationships threaded
through Padura's characters drives this complex, sometimes over-written
narrative. One unsavory triangle involves Mercader, his sociopathic
mother and her Soviet handler, an uber-spy who could have fallen out of
a le Carré novel and who is charged with orchestrating the murder of
Trotsky. Not only must Trotsky be killed, so must his children,
relatives and followers. Moreover, a propaganda campaign worthy of
Goebbels is launched to erase Trotsky from Russian history and to depict
him as a gutless pervert, secretly aligned with Hitler and the fascists.
Never mind that Trotsky was Jewish and that it was Stalin who forged a
pact with Hitler. It is during Trotsky's asylum in Mexico City, living
in the house of Diego Rivera, that Mercader is deployed into action.
Stalin wanted a savage, “spectacular” killing, not just a simple
poisoning like the one he ordered for Trotsky's son. More to his liking
was the machine-gun siege, led by the mad muralist David Alfaro
Siqueiros, that Trotsky had miraculously survived. Three months later,
on Aug. 20, 1940, Mercader plunges an ice ax into the back of Trotsky's
head. Nevertheless, when bodyguards tackle Mercader to the floor, the
mortally wounded Trotsky calls out for them to desist, saving his
assassin's life: “This man has a story to tell.” Indeed, Mercader did.
Yet he never talked during his 20 years in a Mexican prison or in the 18
years thereafter while living in the Soviet Union and Cuba — knowing
that to do so would be his own death warrant. Padura opens his story in
2004, long after these events have passed into history. Iván Cárdenas
Maturell has just lost his beloved wife to a bone cancer that began with
“vitamin-deficient polyneuritis” incurred from subpar food rations
throughout the 1990s. His brilliant brother, a doctor tossed out of his
profession for being gay, had drowned earlier during an escape attempt.
Alone and despondent, Iván reflects on his blighted ambitions and
thwarted career. The persecution of Iván for subversive writings is
transparently modeled on the collective trials and tribulations of
Cuba's post-Revolution writers: the silencing of the great José Lezama
Lima, the harassment of Virgilio Pinera and most pointedly, the shaming
of Heberto Padilla, who after 38 days of arrest in 1971, read a mea
culpa before his peers, condemning himself. It is within this airless,
turgid ecosystem, where self-censorship trumps even the state's minders,
that Padura has lived and worked. Berated by his wife for not writing
his story earlier, Iván confesses, “Fear kept me from writing.” As such,
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.' - Washington Post

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The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura; book review

    By Jane Jakeman, www.independent.co.uk
    View Original
    February 14th, 2014

Padura will be most familiar to British readers through his Cuban crime
series featuring the disobedient detective, Mario Conde.

The Man Who loved Dogs is a work of an entirely different nature –
though it does deal with a violent crime. In 1977 a young Cuban writer
becomes fascinated by a mysterious stranger walking his dogs on a Havana
beach. These animals are Russian wolfhounds. Beautiful canine
aristocrats, they were the hunting dogs of the Russian aristocracy. The
stranger is no ordinary dog-owner. He has other signs of privilege:
amazingly for Cuba, a new car plus an ever-present attendant. The young
man, eking out a living as a veterinary assistant, strikes up a curious
friendship and when one of the wolfhounds is sick, the owner asks his
help in assisting with a merciful lethal injection.

It comes as a shock to learn that his new friend, this tender-hearted
animal-lover, has committed one of the most notorious murders of all
time – the assassination of Trotsky. As the narrator says, it is as if
someone has ‘escaped from history’ and materialised on a Cuban beach.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.

In 1940 a treacherous friend of Trotsky’s household entered his
closely-guarded home in Mexico and killed the Russian revolutionary
leader with an ice-axe. Few people realise that his murderer, Ramon
Mercader del Rio, was a young Spaniard who was eventually welcomed by
Fidel Castro to Cuba, dividing the rest of his life between Cuba and
Russia till his death in 1978.

Padura’s book is a massive undertaking, a fictional survey of the
terrible history of the struggle between two equally ruthless
revolutionaries, Trotsky and Stalin, of the mass murders and
show-trials, and of the trusting millions caught up in it. As the author
says, it is the tale of ‘how and why the utopia was corrupted’. In Cuba,
with a population cut off from uncensored information, the truth was not
fully known until the ultimate betrayal by Russia in the 1990s, when
much of the population was reduced to starvation.

The wolfhounds work wonderfully as a metaphor for old Russia, elegant,
superfluous yet somehow compulsively attractive even to hard-line
revolutionaries. Trotsky was an animal-lover, travelling with his canine
companion, the much-loved Maya, whom he would never abandon.

This book is in fact the story of three men who loved dogs: the young
narrator, the cold-blooded assassin with his pedigree canines and
Trotsky himself. It is this insight into their characters, this glimpse
of tenderness within, which redeems the leading personages from being
mere historical ciphers, and Padura bestows the novelist’s gift of
turning them into living human beings for whom one can feel pity and
fear. When this novel was published in Spanish five years ago, it
received literary acclaim across Europe and rightly so, for it is a
monumental work.