The Man Who Loved Dogs

⚖The case for it

You come to this for the Mercader chapters, which trace without flinching how an idealist gets machined into the man who drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. Iván, the Cuban narrator, is the flimsiest of the three legs, and Padura keeps halting the story to unload his research and hammer a lesson the assassination had already delivered. Sit with that anyway. The length works as attrition; you feel the decades grind the faith out of everyone who believed in Stalinism. Finish it, and the word betrayal carries a weight it did not have before.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Padura's Cuban frame narrator, Iván, is the weakest of the three strands, and the novel keeps returning to him to restate what the Trotsky and Mercader chapters already dramatized. Research arrives in slabs of exposition; you can feel the files being emptied into the prose. The themes get announced, then announced again, across six hundred pages.

— the honest librarian