When on the back cover of a book this is described as an "unclassifiable text", I tend to be sceptical and dubious (unclassifiable because I am faced with an extremely good book, because it goes beyond the norm, because it is not ascribed to a specific genre, because it tells us something extremely bizarre?) and I hope that the adjective is merely a commercial hook.
I fell because the subject is the ones I like: loss and dog, so, a priori, I promised. The main character is a writer who loses her friend and mentor and has to take care of her dog (an arthritic Great Dane), because the wife of the deceased doesn't get out of the fig to take care of herself (she reminds him of the deceased, she says, and the dog just waits for the owner to come back... how to explain death to a dog?) Total, that the porta, that is a saint and accepts in spite of having a dwarf floor, that with such a bug is even more so and at the risk of losing it because it is not allowed to have animals in it.
I expected to find a narration of the day to day of human and dog, of the advances of the two, of the mutual adaptation, of anecdotes, typical moments of tostadas that after happened they seem to you funny but that just when they happen you would want to kill someone,... I expected a history of the relation between two so different species instead of what I have found.
"Animals don't cry. But they can, and in fact, they do, fall apart. They can, and they do, have a broken heart. They can, and it happens to them, lose their heads."
And what have I found? Well, yes, there is a story of living together, of the intense daily relationship between the woman and an almost old dog (I was crazy to know that a Great Dane lives at most ten years!), but it is certainly an unclassifiable text because, apart from talking about the dog and coexistence, the author is consistently distributing throughout the book reflections on life, loss, love, sex, friendship, mourning, dogs and especially literature. Literary quotations, thoughts on literature, literature as therapy and self-help, writing courses, advice and prohibitions of writing, political correctness in writing, classes of writers, meta literature ... and everything fitted perfectly into a discourse in which we go from one subject to another without noticing the change, following the thread of the reel that releases us with a careful, elegant and sensitive prose.
"Your pet is sick, but what's wrong, what's the problem? I don't have an answer.
That your dog, who thinks you are God, thinks you have the power to stop suffering but for some reason (have I upset you in any way?) you refuse to do so, is an unbearable thought. "
But what I liked the most, and even made me think about, were the doubts that the author had about what goes on in her head, not only of her dog but of all dogs. You can see that she really cares about understanding them, that she has empathy for them and that she gives her dog as much welfare as possible.
"How does a dog feel when his master leaves him crammed into one of those trucks? Do dogs understand betrayal? I guess not. It seems to me that the main thing in the mind of the mastiff, on his way to the slaughterhouse, is Who will now protect the Master?"
And I put these quotes because they are the most impact me, but I repeat, Sigrid Nunez is not limited to the subject animal and has much, but much, to talk about, especially literature, which for something that is their environment, is a writer, has given courses and lectures, and his day to day fills with classes to future (brilliant or unsuccessful or surrendered) writers.
"So, at what point does a dying animal become aware of what's happening to it? Is it possible that it's far in advance? And how do animals respond to aging? Do they feel completely confused or do they somehow sense what those signs mean?
- The friend is, in the end, a metaliterary exercise of self-help to overcome a duel (I don't know if real or fictitious). A letter to the deceased friend whom he misses so much. A rare book, difficult to classify, but which is read with great pleasure, and in which we let ourselves be carried along by lines that could well be the reflection of the author's thoughts at dizzying speed, basting an appointment with a memory, this one with a thought and this one with a film...
A book with a strange charm that I could have read a lot more about. A rare avis to enjoy reading with.