The Man Who Loved Dogs

September 23, 2013
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.

Starred review from November 1, 2013
Cuban writer Padura delivers a complex, ever deepening tale of politics and intrigue worthy of an Alan Furst or Roberto Bolano. Best known as a writer of literate procedurals, Padura turns to a deeper mystery, and one that is fraught with danger in most of the communist world--namely, the 1940 assassination in Mexico City of the dissident Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. To tell the story, Padura inserts roman a clef elements: A writer much like him, Ivan Cardenas Maturell, has run afoul of the regime for supposedly counterrevolutionary thought, and now, he has been hustled off in a quiet corner to edit a veterinary publication. Ironically, he remains the true believer of his past, ascetic and convinced that the socialist path leads to heaven: "[T]here is nothing closer to communist morality," he remarks, "than Catholic precepts." Now unmoored, he meets an old man who owns a brace of hounds and who, it turns out, was the assassin who did Trotsky in. As Ivan and the dying Ramon Mercader, who has lived a life "so full of tremendous convulsions," develop something that approaches a friendship, they chart the differences between the revolutionary generations of the 1930s and the 1960s, the point of view shifting back and forth to examine what might have worked and what certainly failed in the Soviet experiment. Trotsky, hounded by his longtime rival Josef Stalin, figures prominently in the narrative, querulous but rightfully aggrieved as he endures a life on the run; he can scarcely believe that "once the socialist dream was achieved, it would be necessary to call upon the proletariat to rebel against their own state." Yet, until his appointed destiny with Mercader, that is just what he busies himself doing, causing a schism that persists--and one in which Padura's aims will no doubt be argued over. Long but without excess; philosophically charged but swiftly moving. A superb intellectual mystery.

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October 15, 2013

In an ambitious switch from his acclaimed detective fiction, this sprawling novel from Padura (the 2012 winner of Cuba's National Prize for Literature) spins three alternating narrative threads. The largest traces renegade revolutionary Leon Trotsky's long exile from Russia through his stays in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico. The second strand focuses on his assassin, Ramon Mercader (the dog lover of the title), from his early years in Spain to communist indoctrination. The shortest and most original is that of Cuban veterinarian Ivan Cardenas, into whose vagarious life enters a stranger who ends up being none other than Mercader. The three plots culminate in a narrative twist that catches the reader off guard. Focusing on global events of the 1930s, swarming with secondary characters, and climaxing with Trotsky's brutal 1940 assassination, and with brief appearances at the Stalin purge trials and the Spanish Civil War, Padura's work is historically accurate. The documentary style, however, fails to develop characters convincingly, and the details of the assassination are given comparatively short shrift. VERDICT This novel will appeal especially to readers who know (or want to know) the Trotsky story, though the title won't make the connection intuitive.--Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

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