The Man Who Loved Dogs: A Novel

This is one of the best novels I have ever read. I admit that my interest was no doubt provoked by the fact that I have read Isaac Deutsche's biography of Trotsky three times and also I have read Isaac Don Levine's book "The Mind of an Assassin". I have even visited the house in Coyoacan near Mexico City where Trotsky was murdered by Ramon Mercader. So I picked up the book a bit skeptically, wondering what a CUBAN writer of all things could do with it. It's obvious that Padura did meticulous research, but what is more important, he brings to the facts some of the literary imagination of a first-class novelist. I found myself riveted by the book; it kept me up until 2 a.m. most nights. Someone has said that it is a Russia novel written by a Cuban. I'm not sure of that. It is a great novel by a great writer. Having read this English translation (which by the way seems absolutely remarkable) I am going to get Padura's other novels in Spanish and read them (I am bilingual, as it happens. I bought this edition because it was the most available.)

This book is frighteningly relevant to our time. It is about Stalin, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, about Cuba, about Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, and about what happened in these places where revolutions promised so much? But above all else, it is about us. Can we maintain our beliefs and our values, even when they are under threat? Why is it seemingly so easy to manipulate people with false info? It asks the question- can we work together and what will it take?

Padura's overly long, often tedious, "The Man Who Loved Dogs" is a tale told in three voices of the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, in August 1940; two third party narratives of the doings of Trotsky and Ramon Mercader, the Spanish assassin, and the first person voice of the writer, a Cuban, who assumes a nom de plume in uncovering the writings of Mercader. Fact or fiction, Padura calls it a "novelistic tale," the almost 600 page book is well written, inventive and clever, with strong characterizations of Trotsky, his family, Mercader, his family, his Stalinist handlers and the writer and various walk ons. Looming over all is Stalin, his cadre of operatives, his stratagems, purges, and the deadly game between Stalin and Trotsky played out after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union in the late twenties. At the end, after Mercader serves 20 years, he meets his chief handler in Moscow to discuss and analyze; what comes out is that peculiarly Russian logic to events and thought impacted by the powerful aftermath of the Communist world. This is Padura's reflection on how “the twentieth century's great utopia was corrupted."

There is something soothing about the way the story builds very slowly. Despite a lot of foreshadowing, and the known historic facts, there is just enough suspense to keep that half of my brain engaged, while the other half enjoys the storytelling craftsmanship. The ability to peer into the mind of a soviet believer, and experience their complete disorientation when the Soviet block fell, is fascinating. As is often the case with translated works, I sometimes wishe I had it in Spanish too, so I could check whether a particular wording was selected by the author or the translator.

Leon Trotsky is the visionary of the Bolshevik Socialist Revolution in Russia.Joseph Stalin is his nemesis, who exiles him and then relentlessly pursues him.Ramon Mercader, socialist Spanish Civil War soldier who becomes enthralledwith Stalinism, is turned into the hired killer of Leon Trotsky. Ivan, an idealist ofthe Cuban socialist experiment, over time becomes profoundly disillusioned.All three of these demoralized "men who love dogs" are portrayed by the authorLeonardo Padura with compassion and psychological complexity. They retaina moral courage in the face of unfathomable losses and betrayals.I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to understand more deeplyhow human beings get swept away by dogmas, illusive ideals and 'group-think.'And, in the process, loose the ability to see what is actually happening, and alsothe ability to think about the consequences of what is occurring in the moment.

A strength of the novel is the insight it gives into the motivation of someone like Mercader, or even Kirov, his GPU handler, who might have started out a genuine believer in the communist future, but ends up corrupted by the lies and murderous violence of the Stalinist machine. But the novel is unrelentingly bleak and pessimistic about the possibilities of such a future, including those shown by some aspects of the Cuban Revolution, about which the author is uniformly negative. Contrast the sentiment expressed in Trotsky's final testament that life is beautiful with Padura's evident belief that it is pile of excrement.I also found Anna's Kushner's translation, much praised on the dust jacket blurbs, rather clumsy in places, as if she had used the exact dictionary equivalent of a word or phrase without conveying the sense.

When I finished this book, it was like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. For all that this is the most powerful demolition of revolutionary communism that I’ve ever read, it was far from an easy read. Leonardo Paduro puts his readers almost inside the skin of those who believed in the workers’ paradise, and it’s not a comfortable place to be.The first of the three narrative strands concerns Trotsky himself. It’s easy to detect Paduro’s sympathy here; when he was growing up in Castro’s Cuba, Trotsky was such a non-person that hardly anyone had even heard of him. For all that Trotsky professed his belief in a democratic form of socialism, Paduro points to his brutal suppression of the rebellion at the Kronshtadt Naval Base in 1921—the heroes of the 1917 revolution were slaughtered to keep the Bolsheviks in power. If we feel sorry for Trotsky, it’s mostly because he really did love dogs, and his arch-enemy Stalin was evil incarnate. For all that Paduro emphasises that his book is a novel, Trotsky’s life is very well documented, not the least by Trotsky himself.The second strand involves Trotsky’s assassin, the Spaniard Ramon Mercader del Rio. His mother Caridad raised him after she divorced her wealthy Catalonian husband, and she became a committed communist. Ramon fought in the Spanish Civil War, but his mother introduced him to Nahum Eitingon, one of Stalin’s most ruthless enforcers. They both saw Ramon as someone who was weak enough to surrender his own agency, yet ruthless enough to kill on command. We are told that Ramon also loves dogs—but as Paduro admits, none of those involved left much in the way of a paper trail, so he had to improvise on what he could find from the historical record.The third strand involves Ivan, a fictional Cuban writer and veterinarian who supposedly meets the aging Mercader after he served his 20 years in a Mexican jail and was honored as a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ for keeping schtum about his true identity whilst in jail. This thread serves mostly to provide an explanation for the supposedly intimate portrait of Mercader’s mind as he faced death from cancer, but it also serves to show what it was like to grow up in Castro’s Cuba.Remarkably, all three strands work slowly crabwise towards the assassination, which is very near the end of this 572-page doorstop. Each character in the drama is referred to by so many different names or labels that it’s hard to keep track of even the main actors in this drama. In the reader’s mind, this recreates the feeling that life has no fixed moral or even factual anchors—and that no one can be trusted, except one’s dog. In the end, Caridad and Eitingon outlast Stalin, but finally come to understand how they’ve prostituted their lives to false prophets and betrayed those who trusted them. Paduro never mentions any of the other communist leaders like Mao and Pol Pot who slaughtered their own people, and his novel is that much the stronger for resisting this temptation.

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.

Hemmingway could have written this book in six words: Spaniard. Kills Trotsky. Feels betrayed. Dies.But Padura is a different sort of writer, carefully positioning information so the reader can make up his or her mind about what it important. I bought this book before a trip to Cuba thinking to read it while I was there but in paperback it weighs a hefty 880 grams so I demurred.Lucky me. The Cuban parts of the book read so very true to what the people we met in Cuba told us of their country. The opening sentence of the book ("Rest in peace" were the pastor's last words.) and the description of life in Cuba resonated strongly with me and made the fictional retelling of Trostky's odyssey and Ramon's fundamentalism so riveting.The translation is good. The book is full of those long paragraphs detailing small things that people writing in the Spanish tradition love. Sometimes it is slightly irritating but I always wanted to read more. The history of Russia after the revolution, the Spanish civil war and of the international communist movement does not get much airing in the west and this remarkable book taught me a lot. Entertaining. Epic. Tragic. Profound. Highly recommended.

This book is beautifully constructed around three people. The story is intricately woven between them allowing one to be sucked into the plot from three different perspectives. The work is based heavily on fact...and as such it is a serious reading endeavour. However if you are interested in that fateful August afternoon when LeonTrotsky was assassinated by Ramon Mercader...this is definitely a book for you.It is quite simply a breathtaking novel.

A sympathetic account of the assassination of Bronstein. The writer gives the reader much food for thought. Did the assassin and the assassinated have anything in common? Who do you feel sorry for? Will those who want to exercise political power always be corrupted by it? This is a good read for people with left leanings as well as Trotsky aficionados. It is well written. It is, perhaps, appropriate that the author usually produces crime fiction.