The Difficulty of Being a Dog

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Summary: contemplating canines
Review: A collection of 43 brief ruminations about dogs from literature and philosophical works. This book is very-- for lack of a better word-- "French" (if you've ever read any 20th century French philosophy, you'll know what I mean), and is recommended primarily for those who love both dogs and fine literature.

Rating:
Summary: contemplating canines
Review: A collection of 43 brief ruminations about dogs from literature and philosophical works. This book is very-- for lack of a better word-- "French" (if you've ever read any 20th century French philosophy, you'll know what I mean), and is recommended primarily for those who love both dogs and fine literature.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece!
Review: A real surprise and delight. This beautiful little book consists of about forty short chapters about the bond between people and dogs. Grenier shuttles between charming recollections of his late dog Ulysses and tales of dogs who preoccupied great figures in Western culture. He tells, for instance, how Sartre summed up the difficulty of being a dog: dogs are forever straining to understand us, but what they comprehend most keenly is that we're beyond their grasp. Rilke, along the same lines, called dogs "tragic and sublime" because "their determination to acknowledge us forces them to live at the very limits of their nature, constantly-through the humanness of their gaze, their nostalgic nuzzlings-on the verge of passing beyond those limits." The book, which is translated (very gracefully) from the French, makes a nice European respite for American lovers of dog literature. There is, for instance, Grenier's account of a time when Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia saw dog ownership as a kind of subversion: walking his own dog in Prague, Grenier hears a young man call out to him, "Long live the dogs!" All in all, I would rank this with J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, James Herriot's dog stories, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's books among the masterpieces of canine celebration.

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Summary: Dogs in French Lit
Review: Although i'm very familiar with the dog's of English literature, i've never before seen a overview of French dog literature. Make no mistake, dogs are as much a subject for French philosophy in this book as for their own intrinsic nature. (This fellow really likes our Faulkner's insight into dog's too, btw.)

Because Grenier is intereseted in dogs as a metaphor in human history, he visits some some really horrific historical animal abuse scenes. Not for the faint of heart are contemparary descriptions of the Dog Island of Tukey or his insight into the dog buried in sand painting by Goya. As this book points out, we've tried most horrors out on animals before we have visited them on humans. Also.... Grenier has the unfortunate, male, knee jerk reaction to what he considers feminine interpretations of dog mental states. Anyone who would say Collete does not have true insight into dogs is saying more about his own attitude toward the female than he says about that eccentric writer. And... his worst insult is, "a society matron's interpretation". Whatever. Would recomend this book to all. I stayed up way too late last night!;)

Rating:
Summary: Dogs in French Lit
Review: Although i'm very familiar with the dog's of English literature, i've never before seen a overview of French dog literature. Make no mistake, dogs are as much a subject for French philosophy in this book as for their own intrinsic nature. (This fellow really likes our Faulkner's insight into dog's too, btw.)

Because Grenier is intereseted in dogs as a metaphor in human history, he visits some some really horrific historical animal abuse scenes. Not for the faint of heart are contemparary descriptions of the Dog Island of Tukey or his insight into the dog buried in sand painting by Goya. As this book points out, we've tried most horrors out on animals before we have visited them on humans. Also.... Grenier has the unfortunate, male, knee jerk reaction to what he considers feminine interpretations of dog mental states. Anyone who would say Collete does not have true insight into dogs is saying more about his own attitude toward the female than he says about that eccentric writer. And... his worst insult is, "a society matron's interpretation". Whatever. Would recomend this book to all. I stayed up way too late last night!;)

Rating:
Summary: So Good It Made Me Roll Over
Review: How many varieties of pleasure can a book offer a reader? Read this book and count your own delight in its wit, wisdom, emotional truth, sweetness, deviltry, beautiful writing and as many other rare qualities as you can find. Grenier, an editor at the venerable French publishing firm Editions Gallimard, writes hilariously and affectionately about his own dogs, foremost among them the noble Ulysses and the happily trampy Sarigue. He also ranges through world literature to recount with great Gallic charm the experiences and musings of many others who have similarly fallen under the canine spell. In one section, he notes, "Schopenhauer, the pessimist, wrote about the goodness of dogs: 'I would have no pleasure living in a world where dogs did not exist.' Depressed, and prey to phobias, he alternated portraits of dogs with portraits of great philosophers on the walls of his little apartment in Frankfurt." Page after page bristle with startling facts and opinions that combine this same complex mix of the erudite, idiosyncratic, insightful, affecting and zany. He also remarks in passing that, "Any bookstore will tell you that books about cats sell much better than books about dogs. Who's to say why?" This unique and entrancing book could well end up disproving Grenier's own statement.

Rating:
Summary: The best of two worlds
Review: This delightful book is a treasure if you care about the two worlds of animals and literature. Pault Grenier has perfectly paid tribute to his deep love of dogs by presenting it wrapped in a wealth of literary wit and sharp writing.

If you can get through this book without a continual smile and a deeper emotional bond with your own dog, then you're a hard case indeed.

Rating:
Summary: Dog gone boring
Review: This is not a warm-fuzzy, charming dog book. It's more a thoughtful, philosophical look -- in small, bite-size bits -- at the relationships between dogs and humans, and what humans have made of dogs in their writings.

The "chapters" are more like Pascalian pensees: mostly two to three pages, but sometimes as short as one paragraph. They discuss everything from dogs in dreams and famous literary non-appreciators of dogs, to ghastly historical incidents such as the rounding up and exile to an island of thousands of dogs so that they starved and ate one another, by the Turks in 1910.

Grenier recalls many writers' real and authorial canine doings, but the accent is on French writers (the author has been an editor for the distinguished French press Gallimard), so unless the names Larbaud, Queneau, Mauriac, Valery, Chateaubriand, or Romain Gary mean a lot, you are apt to feel like a stranger at the cocktail party. It can come as a relief when Grenier returns to the concrete and relates incidents with his own dog, Ulysses.

(Faulker, Turgenev, Jack London and Kundera also turn up, although Grenier discusses Descartes's dismissal of animal souls and subsequent writers' response yet never mentions Kundera's lengthy discussion of the topic in _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_. The description of a Virginia Woolf novel narrated by a dog, _Flush_, sounds fascinating, though; how come I've never heard of this book?)

Elegant, erudite, but perhaps a little too heady for the American reader.