Synopses & Reviews
Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication is never easy. Dog love can be a precious but melancholy thing.
An attempt to understand human attachment to the canis familiaris in terms of reciprocity and empathy, Melancholiaandrsquo;s Dog tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual artsandmdash;the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending to the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.
Review
andldquo;This is probably the first time that a scholar of Kuzniarandrsquo;s ability has shown the courage to tackle the deeper aspects of our relationship with dogs. . . . Our dogs are metaphors for ourselves, something that many of us may have long suspected, but because the idea had never been articulated, or not fully, perhaps we did not appreciate the fact. Or perhaps we didnandrsquo;t want to face it. Thanks to Alice A. Kuzniar, we know it now.andrdquo;
Synopsis
The forty-three lovingly crafted vignettes within
The Difficulty of Being a Dog dig elegantly to the center of a long, mysterious, and often intense relationship: that between human beings and dogs. In doing so, Roger Grenier introduces us to dogs real and literary, famous and reviled—from Ulysses's Argos to Freud's Lün to the hundreds of dogs exiled from Constantinople in 1910 and deposited on a desert island—and gives us a sense of what makes our relationships with them so meaningful.
About the Author
Roger Grenier, an editor at �ditions Gallimard, has published over thirty novels, short stories, and literary essays and is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix de Litt�ature de l'Acad�mie Fran�aise.Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir, The Collaborator, The Interpreter, and Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, and the translator of OK, Joe, The Difficulty of Being a Dog, A Box of Photographs, and Palace of Books. Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Table of Contents
Preface
An Enigma
The Difficulty of Being a Dog
A Reproachful Glance
The World of Odors
Low Life
Dogs' Paradise
A Dog with a Past
Flaubert, from Python to Parrot
The Walk down the Rue du Bac
To Be Loved
A dog, yes, but...
Friends of Animals
Our Great Men
Heroes and Refugees
Larbaud, or Bourgeois Follies
Identification
Vocation
Fantasies, Symbols, Signals
Metaphysics
Voltaire versus Rousseau
First Prize
Animal-Machines
Modestine
Gaston Febus
Two Hunters
The Brutes
To the East
The Island of Oxias
Enemies
Evolution
Questions of Vocabulary
A Dog's Heart
Dreams after Ulysses' Death
Flush
The Fiancèe of Goering's Dog
On Pure Love
Misanthropes
Dog and Cat
The Night in Hendaye
Debtors
Dino, Queneau's Dog
Horse, Goat, Dog
The Dog-Book
Translator's Note