Dog Symphony
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
A breakthrough novel from the acclaimed young American writer
Boris Leonidovich, a North American professor who specializes in the history of prison architecture, has been invited to Buenos Aires for an academic conference. He’s planning to present a paper on Moscow’s feared Butyrka prison, but most of all he’s looking forward to seeing his enigmatic, fiercely intelligent colleague (and sometime lover) Ana again. As soon as Boris arrives, however, he encounters obstacle after unlikely obstacle: he can’t get in touch with Ana, he locks himself out of his rented room, and he discovers dog-feeding stations and water bowls set before every house and business. With night approaching, he finds himself lost and alone in a foreign city filled with stray dogs, all flowing with sinister, bewildering purpose though the darkness...
Shadowed with foreboding, and yet alive with the comical mischief of César Aira and the nimble touch of a great stylist, Dog Symphony is an un-nerving and propulsive novel by a talented new American voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A historian of prison architecture attends a conference in Buenos Aires and gets sucked into a surreal neighborhood patrolled by dogs in this clever novel from Munson (The November Criminals). Boris Leonidovich, a professor from an unnamed university in North America, has come to Argentina for a conference at the request of his colleague and sometimes lover, Dr. Ana Mariategui. But when he arrives, Ana is nowhere to be found. She is missing from his scheduled lecture on the Butyrka prison, as well as the opening reception for the conference. After misplacing his keys to the pension where he's staying, Boris wanders Buenos Aires in search of Ana and ends up following a pack of stray dogs that begins to grow as the dogs meander through the night. Two flower vendors Boris befriends explain that the dogs come from a crack in the wall of a cemetery and only started appearing after a recent epidemic. All the citizens place two bowls for the dogs one for water, one for meat and everywhere Boris goes he hears the same song being whistled and playing from radios. "Dog Symphony," a cab driver tells him. With subtle humor and hypnotic prose ("my visual field fishbowled as I dragged sandy detritus of another sleepless night from my eyes"), Munson's strange, highly stylized story morphs into a wry critique of authoritarian nationalism in the vein of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros.
