The Difficulty of Being a Dog [Hardcover]

Roger Grenier (Author), Alice Kaplan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2000

The forty-three lovingly crafted vignettes within The Difficulty of Being a Dog dig elegantly to the center of a long, mysterious, and often intense relationship: that between human beings and dogs. In doing so, Roger Grenier introduces us to dogs real and literary, famous and reviled—from Ulysses's Argos to Freud's Lün to the hundreds of dogs exiled from Constantinople in 1910 and deposited on a desert island—and gives us a sense of what makes our relationships with them so meaningful.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What is a dog? In the hands of French fiction writer, essayist and quintessential dog lover Grenier (Another November), the canine emerges over the course of its all too brief life as a faithful and loving companion, a protection against loneliness and life's insults, a connoisseur of foul odors and a playmate always ready to join its owner in cavorting like a fool. In this collection of several dozen delightful and poignant anecdotal pieces, he ranges over our 12,000-year relationship with dogs, from those who appeared in Greek and Roman mythologyDlike the three-headed Cerberus, who guarded the gates of HellDto the dogs that appear in our dreams (in this case, Grenier's dreams of his own old dog, Ulysses). Probing the dark side of the human-dog bond, Grenier sensitively observes how, at times, we humans have been less than faithful to our canine friends, giving rise to such sayings as, "'He died like a dog.'" With whimsical humor and mordant wit, he applies a broad and deep knowledge of literary dog lovers from Homer to Flaubert and Faulkner, elaborating not only on their insights into dog-love and hate but also on what these writers' revelations tell us about ourselves. (Dec.)
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Review

"This slim volume is beautifully written, and the prose flows like poetry. The market has been flooded with a plethora of popularly written books attempting to explain canines and why people love them, yet this book... raises the subject to a higher plane. A gem." - Library Journal, starred review "[L]iterate, light and lighthearted....[A] kind of anthology of literary musings about dogs based on Mr. Grenier's extensive readings in everything from Faulkner to the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki." - Richard Bernstein, New York Times "[A] very superior commonplace book of canine characteristics, the mixture of Grenier's own anecdotes with quotations from other intellectuals making it far from the average gift-shop item - as if Roland Barthes had opted for domestic animals rather than for fashion or photography." - John Stokes, Times Literary Supplement "With whimsical humor and mordant wit, [Grenier] applies a broad and deep knowledge of literary dog lovers from Homer to Flaubert and Faulkner, elaborating not only on their insights into doglove and hate but also on what these writers' revelations tell us about ourselves....[A]n appealing gift item, this slim volume will make lovers both of literature and canines sit up and take notice." - Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 139 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226308278
• ISBN-13: 978-0226308272
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,127,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 101 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece!, November 29, 2000

By 

julia adeney thomas (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Difficulty of Being a Dog (Hardcover)

A real surprise and delight. This beautiful little book consists of about forty short chapters about the bond between people and dogs. Grenier shuttles between charming recollections of his late dog Ulysses and tales of dogs who preoccupied great figures in Western culture. He tells, for instance, how Sartre summed up the difficulty of being a dog: dogs are forever straining to understand us, but what they comprehend most keenly is that we're beyond their grasp. Rilke, along the same lines, called dogs "tragic and sublime" because "their determination to acknowledge us forces them to live at the very limits of their nature, constantly-through the humanness of their gaze, their nostalgic nuzzlings-on the verge of passing beyond those limits." The book, which is translated (very gracefully) from the French, makes a nice European respite for American lovers of dog literature. There is, for instance, Grenier's account of a time when Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia saw dog ownership as a kind of subversion: walking his own dog in Prague, Grenier hears a young man call out to him, "Long live the dogs!" All in all, I would rank this with J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, James Herriot's dog stories, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's books among the masterpieces of canine celebration.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So Good It Made Me Roll Over, January 12, 2001

By 

J. McFarland "jbmcfar" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Difficulty of Being a Dog (Hardcover)

How many varieties of pleasure can a book offer a reader? Read this book and count your own delight in its wit, wisdom, emotional truth, sweetness, deviltry, beautiful writing and as many other rare qualities as you can find. Grenier, an editor at the venerable French publishing firm Editions Gallimard, writes hilariously and affectionately about his own dogs, foremost among them the noble Ulysses and the happily trampy Sarigue. He also ranges through world literature to recount with great Gallic charm the experiences and musings of many others who have similarly fallen under the canine spell. In one section, he notes, "Schopenhauer, the pessimist, wrote about the goodness of dogs: 'I would have no pleasure living in a world where dogs did not exist.' Depressed, and prey to phobias, he alternated portraits of dogs with portraits of great philosophers on the walls of his little apartment in Frankfurt." Page after page bristle with startling facts and opinions that combine this same complex mix of the erudite, idiosyncratic, insightful, affecting and zany. He also remarks in passing that, "Any bookstore will tell you that books about cats sell much better than books about dogs. Who's to say why?" This unique and entrancing book could well end up disproving Grenier's own statement.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best of two worlds, December 11, 2001

By 

"librarybuff" (Frisco, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Difficulty of Being a Dog (Hardcover)

This delightful book is a treasure if you care about the two worlds of animals and literature. Pault Grenier has perfectly paid tribute to his deep love of dogs by presenting it wrapped in a wealth of literary wit and sharp writing.

If you can get through this book without a continual smile and a deeper emotional bond with your own dog, then you're a hard case indeed.