— fiction-mystery-crime —
The Man Who Loved Dogs
Leonardo Padura
— 2009 —
“
Three narrative strands: Trotsky's exile and assassination, the killer Ramon Mercader's trajectory, and a Cuban writer in the 1970s discovering the story.
⚖The case for it
Three narrative strands: Trotsky's exile and assassination, the killer Ramon Mercader's trajectory, and a Cuban writer in the 1970s discovering the story. Padura's 600-page epic is the definitive Latin American crime novel, treating history as crime scene, the 20th century's political crimes finally indicted. CrimeReads named it best crime novel of the 2010s.
— the canon
✕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
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