An impressive piece of historical fiction that does a good job of creating the sense of the Stalin/Trotsky enmity and the radical divergence of their followers in the 30's and their aftermath. Dense and detailed, the book is not a fast read. Very well researched.

Me encanto el libro. La manera en que toca todos los temas es genial. Se pone un poco pesado por momentos, con tantos nombres e información, pero es muy llevadero. Se recomienda mucho !

The assassin and his prey...

The story of three men whose lives become intertwined across decades and continents, the book primarily tells of the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Its purpose runs deeper though: to look at the corruption and failure of the utopian dream of communism and to inspire compassion for the people caught up in this vast and dreadful experiment.

Iván is a failed writer living in Cuba under Castro. Having inadvertently crossed the regime in his youth, he has lost confidence in his ability to write anything worthwhile that will be acceptable under the strict censorship in force at the time. We meet him as his wife is dying, in the near present. He tells her of a man he once knew, the man who loved dogs, and of the strange story this man told him. His wife asks him why he never wrote the story, and the book is partly Iván's attempt to explain his reluctance.

The story the man who loved dogs told Iván is of Ramón Mercader del Rio, a young Spaniard caught up in the Spanish Civil War, who is recruited by the Stalinist regime to assassinate Stalin's great enemy, Trotsky. This introduces the two main strands of the novel which run side by side, with Iván's story fading somewhat into the background. We follow Ramón through the Spanish Civil War, learning a good deal about that event as we go, and seeing the idealism which drove many of those on the Republican side to believe that the USSR was a shining beacon to the masses of the world. And we meet Trotsky just as he is exiled from the USSR, with Stalin re-writing history to portray him as a traitor to the Revolution.

This is a monumental novel, both in length and in the depth of detail it presents. I found it fascinating although I felt that huge swathes of it read more like factual history and biography than a fully fictionalised account of events. I've spent much of the last year immersed in the history of the Russian Revolution, and I felt strongly that without all my recently gained knowledge of the politics and personalities, I would have struggled badly both to understand and to maintain my interest in this. I did struggle a bit with all the various factions in the Spanish Civil War, although in the end I was rather clearer about this muddled period of history than I had been before. Once Ramón left that arena to become a tool of the USSR, I felt I was back on more solid ground, however.

Although Padura occasionally refers to some of the atrocities that were carried out by Trotsky or in his name, the overall tone of the book is rather sympathetic to him. This jarred a little – I do see the romantic appeal of Trotsky as a great thinker and orator and a fanatical idealist, but I'm not convinced that he would have been much of an improvement over Stalin had history played out differently and put Trotsky in power. There's a distinct suggestion that Trotsky's actions were forgiveable because they were carried out against enemies of the Revolution, whereas Stalin's crimes were far worse because he turned on those who had fought alongside him to bring the Revolution into being. Firstly, I wasn't convinced by the historical accuracy of this assessment as it related to Trotsky, and secondly... well, an atrocity is an atrocity, surely, however it's justified.

Where the book excels, though, is in the pictures it paints of the lives of Trotsky in exile and Ramón being trained, or brainwashed, depending on how you view it, to be his assassin. The Trotsky strand feels very well grounded in truth, with a lot of references to documented events. Trotsky in the book comes over as a man still fixated on the idea of a Marxist revolution, and obsessed with proving his innocence of the charges of treason against him.

His assassin I know nothing about in real life, so can't say if the same truthfulness applies there. But the Ramón in the book is a fascinating character. We are shown his childhood and relationship with his mother, whose early adoption of communism led her son to take up arms in the Spanish Civil War and introduced him to the Soviet agent who would recruit him. Then we see the brainwashing techniques employed by the Soviets, and Ramón's life under different identities as a sleeper, waiting for the call to act. True or not, it's all entirely credible and convincing.

The third story, that of Iván, felt extraneous to me – yet another excuse for a writer to write about the difficulties of being a writer, a subject which seems to be endlessly fascinating to writers but about which I personally have read more than enough. It does however cast some light on life in Cuba under its own communist regime and as such earns its place in the book, even if I sighed a little each time we ended up back in Iván's company.

The quality of the writing is excellent and for the most part so is the translation by Anna Kushner. There are occasional strange word choices though – sheepherders? Shepherds, surely? - and it uses American spelling and vocabulary – shined, rather than shone, etc. Padura's deep research is complemented by his intelligence and insight, all of which mean that the book is more than a novel – it's a real contribution to the history of 20th century communism across the world, looked at from a human perspective. My only caveat is as I mentioned earlier – without some existing knowledge of the history, it may be a struggle to get through. But for anyone with an interest in the USSR, Cuba or the Spanish Civil War, I'd say it's pretty much an essential read and one I highly recommend.

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The story of three people is woven together - The man who assassinated Leon Trotsky (and loved dogs), Leon Trotsky himself, and a Cuban erstwhile author. The main theme, as I read the book, is disillusion with communism, which in different forms affect all three protagonists - they have all been fervent revolutionaries and are all - in this tale even Trotsky - disappointed and disillusioned.
The book is at its best very good - which is why I kept reading even through the long middle, which was, at times, slow going - for me, the book did stagnate a bit during the passages with Mercader and Trotsky in Mexico. But all in all, it was worth the effort.
(I must say, though, I was sometimes in doubt about this translation. The language didn't always flow too well, and some word choices seemed unnatural.)

Why bring a “noir sensibility” to bear on the story of the assassination of Trotsky? He has already been given the exhaustive bibliographical treatment, played both aged lover and reincarnated ghost in Hollywood, and been satirized by none less than Monty Python. What does the detective novel form have to say about that personage of Trotsky which has become so giant — outgrowing the historical person to become the repository of so many utopian hopes and alternative histories. Does a narrative form traditionally organized around the central question of “whodunit”, employed instead to help answer “why’d he done it”, help bring the appropriate weight to bear on the question about Trotsky’s motives, and by extension of those countless others who struggled for the sake of socialist utopia?

In the case of “The Man Who Loved Dogs” by Leonardo Padura, unfortunately, the answer is no. It is the story of Trotsky, rather, that ends up lending its gravity and immense historical intrigue to the Cuban author’s detective novel. That is not meant as a condemnation of Padura’s novel as such. Given the ideological baggage and textbook level of facts needed to tell such a story, the author has pulled off an impressive feat of novelization that beautifully juxtaposes Trotsky’s personal defeats with two other individuals living on the Soviet periphery. Using three alternating stories, tied together by both anecdotal and thematic parallels, Padura does much to help us bridge the gap between personal and collective trauma and disillusionment.

It is just that the task of giving a conclusive resolution to the motive of the Bolsheviks and their global network of adherents has so far seemed beyond the boundaries of any narrative form. How many historians have already staked their careers on pathologizing the Soviet leaders (or trying to find explanatory power in anything but, as is the case with Stephen Kotkin)? Who could claim to have finally worked out theoretically just where the lure of utopia resides in the psyche? Anyone who has ever sat in on a meeting with Trotskyists or 4th internationalists will know intimately just how exhaustively one can play what-if alternative history games, imagining a more humane Soviet Union if only Trotsky could have won in his battle against Stalin and his bureaucracy. Anyone who is interested in more than than pure satire should acknowledge the vast heritage of thought and speculation that have surrounded Trotsky and the ultimate meaning of his life. Anyone who wishes to write about true believers has to find a way to speak to what, exactly, it is that they truly believed.

In this regard, “The Man Who Loved Dogs” chooses the path of stream of consciousness à la great 19th century Russian novel. We are treated to the exhaustive, self-pitying soliloquies of the dejected exile Trotsky, the impassioned assassin Ramón, and the loser veterinarian copywriter Ivan and are given the responsibility to draw comparison between their fates. There is no gap in the novel between their voices for us to step outside and orient ourselves. No reader of this novel will claim to not have understood what was going on in the minds of these three men, not understood each of their journeys towards disillusionment. And yet, ironically, none of these conclusions feels adequately self-critical. The utopian impulse cannot have merely been the collective effect of so many personal efforts to act of out vanity (Trotsky), fanaticism (Ramon), or boredom (Ivan). There is a dimension above ego that is acknowledged even by the author but remains unarticulated. In order to truly engage with the question of motives, Padura would have had to rise above the level of simultaneous self-examination rooted in the isolated consciousness of these characters, and have used a decentered narratological voice capable of pointing in the direction. An effort to circumvent psychological understandings of the utopian impulse will not succeed with simply more psychological understanding, no matter how many pages are devoted to it.

Joining what now seems like a canon of works based on the life and death of Trotsky, “The Man Who Loved Dogs” represents one of the more serious artistic efforts. The novel works as an effective page-turner, while also remaining faithful to the former term in the designation of “historical fiction”. For anyone interested in studying the global history of the left in the 20th century, one would be hard pressed to find a single work of fiction offering more that this novel. However, even though this is a detective novel which gives away the essential facts of the crime as early as the epigraph, despite its best efforts it still leaves the central mystery unresolved.

gave up after 150 pages because it was kind of boring. occasional flashes of poetic insight but too occasional for my tastes. maybe something is lost in the translation but i did not see the "noir" aspect people have raved about.

Me gustó e intrigó hasta cierto punto, pero siento que estoy descubriendo que no me gusta mucho la ficción histórica o más bien cuando se escribe ficción de personajes históricos reales a menos que sea en una biografía (siento que descubrí esto en las secciones con Frida y Diego). Me gustó como de manejaron las líneas del tiempo, aunque si soy honesta si llegué a confundir a los dos protagonistas y sus respectivos círculos. Por último: no tiene tantos perros como creí que tendría, QDEP el potencial por más perros ja.

Debo admitir que en el primer intento de lectura lo abandoné. No estaba en el mood. Me costó engancharme. En esta segunda ocasión quedé fascinada, la manera de tejer las palabras y crear una historia es mágica. Padura, maestro.