Dog on Fire

Thanks to the University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review Terese Svoboda' 'Dog on Fire.'

It's hard to describe this one in simple terms. It's a tale of loss, love, death, grief, families - 'normal' and otherwise.

The mysterious death of a shovel-slinging brother/son/uncle/boyfriend is the glue that holds it all together. The aftermath of that death focuses on the family and the girlfriend and that complicated and for me ultimately hilarious relationship between them. That's one of of the most enjoyable things about this book - the amount of humor, mainly dark, that's threaded throughout. The development of the main characters and their interaction- the sister and the girlfriend, especially - is wonderful. The cemetery scene late in the book should be horrific but it's funny and human. As the book progresses we see the son, the father, and especially the mother also fleshed out.

Small town, mid-west life is also entwined throughout the novel - the outsider, the oddities, the acceptance.

It's also a mystery - how did the shovel-slinger die? - but that's almost incidental and the answer, when we find out, is dipped in that same humorous pathos we witness throughout the book.

Some people might find the switch between narrators/characters jarring since it's not flagged in any way and I certainly found myself realizing a paragraph or a page in that this is a new voice and had to go back and reread in that voice. I got into the groove as the book proceeded and (although maybe it was simply down to this being an unformatted digital ARC) I took it to be a feature that underlined the closeness of the experience of loss and love even though the characters experiencing those things couldn't be more different on the face of things.

Wow, this is a tour de force of stream-of-consciousness writing in multiple voices, all full of idiosyncrasies and ideas and personas. It's a bit of a wild ride, honestly, and while I didn't really enjoy reading it, it does offer a unique take on poverty and desperation and sexuality and life in small and sad places.

Dog on Fire is a quirky, beautifully written novel. Warning to those sensitive to animal cruelty - the dog in the title actually is on fire, a vivd and disturbing image that is difficult to forget. The book suffers from a lack of editing - there are some places where the pace gets bogged down with too much meandering, and the lack of quotation marks, or any indication that the narrator/speaker has changed is both annoying and jarring, when the reader has to adjust to a new point of view being thrust upon them, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. There are big themes here, and there is a story hidden inside the trying-too-hard oddness of the writing. The author would have been better served letting the two main characters tell their own stories, in their own voices, in a way that allowed the quirkiness to enhance the story, not overwhelm it - but, the weird images of aliens and a kitchen stuffed with packages of green Jell-O, a dark night made dream-like by lingering smoke, two women digging up a grave - are dream-like, strange, and haunting enough to make a real impression on the reader. This one is hard to categorize and hard to critique - the writing is lush and inventive and much of this story stays with you long after the last page is turned.

There's a lot going on in this book.  There's a bit of a mystery, two dysfunctional families, two point of view,, an alcoholic, a child abuse victim, teenage vandals, corrupt cops and an ambiguous ending. Oh yeah, and the dog.

In the end, this really is an exploration of guilt.  A sister trying to come to grips with the feeling her brother died because she didn't do enough and a girlfriend who thinks she did too much.

What remarkable writing. This novel slides past the literal and hits straight in the middle of visceral sense experience. I wasn't always sure what was going on--the writing is like a furious fever dream of sense impression--but I was led forward by a faith that any writer who can craft words this close to the bone, this free of artifice or expectation, is a writer worth following.

In terms of content Dogs on Fire has nothing whatsoever to do with the book it reminded me of most--that would be Malina by Ingeborg Bachman. I'm not sure if that comparison is defensible, the two are so different in tone and intent. But each of these books worked in a way where the primary reading experience was one of intense emotion, of being alive, of feeling one moment spearheading itself violently into the next one as I read along. The experience of reading this novel left me feeling exhausted and befuddled and abused and exalted and purified and joyful. Full disclosure: my impressions may be partly due to last night's insomnia that had me staying up to read this novel. But so it goes. A book comes to us where we are in that moment and speaks to us in that moment. Writing, and reading, can include so many experiences beyond the superficial meanings of words on a page. I enjoyed the plunge. I read it straight through and now I'm going to read it again. As in, right now, here I go.

I can see that this book will find an audience. It's beautifully written as to word choice and arrangement. But, I just couldn't get very fast into it. I'll rate it higher than I liked simply because I can see it's potential. It's about a strange little family. A single mom, her son, her brother who she finds suddenly dead, and his seemingly mentally unstable girlfriend. And a dog who evidently does get set on fire. Just didn't get that far.