The Man Who Loved Dogs
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season576 pages, about 12 hours: the length of 1.8 typical books on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbOne reader reports struggling with the Spanish Civil War chapters without prior background knowledge of that history.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live byIn 17 reviews from critics and book blogs, 8 credit the plot and 7 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesThe Los Angeles Review of Books calls it Tolstoyan in sweep, and The Spectator calls it James Ellroy-like in scope.
The case for it
on the pacing
“Long but without excess; philosophically charged but swiftly moving. A superb intellectual mystery.”
Kirkus Reviews, 2013 on the scope
“Padura has written a historical novel of Tolstoyan sweep.”
Ann Louise Bardach · Los Angeles Review of Books, 2014 on Mercader’s training
“The most striking sections are those which show Mercader’s training”
James Hawking · Historical Novel Society, 2014 on Stalin’s pettiness
“Stalin’s evil feels worse when accompanied by his personal pettiness”
a book blog
The case against
on the prose
“after hundreds of pages of turgid, unleavened prose, this isn’t good enough”
Aaron Thier · The Nation, 2014 on the structure
“the three separate stories remain too separate”
M.A. Orthofer · The Complete Review, 2014 on the length
“The Man Who Loved Dogs is certainly too heavy on the wrists”
Ian Thomson · The Spectator, 2014 on the speeches
“a few of his characters make overlong speeches about the meaning of identity”
Bertrand M. Patenaude · The Wall Street Journal, 2014
