Customer Reviews

Teeth of the Dog

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Ms. Jill Ciment writes good dialogue, creates a very eccentric, quirky setting, and then populates it with some interesting players. Overall I thought the book was just an average to slightly above average read, but her style of writing surpasses the tale she tells this time around.

The setting for, "Teeth Of A Dog", is not so much a blend of cultures as the wreckage of what would be left after a variety of groups collided. With the cities, villages and the island upon which she sets her story, the population is more of an amalgam than of groups. She creates a place where the most extreme ends of the human spectrum should be set on removing the other, but they all seem to just get along either through necessity or apathy.

The couple of Helene and Thomas would be a bit odd if this had been set somewhere else. Even when the Author gives the background for the start of their relationship it's hard to tell if she is being serious or as outrageous as her island. Thomas is a renowned anthropologist whose fieldwork and studies are as clever as they are bizarre. The specific study the couple originally took together would probably make a great book in itself.

The character of Finster, an American dealing in dubious businesses through a haze of, "mariwana" is eccentric, quirky, and potentially dangerous when his hormones are guiding him. He does have his sympathetic/pathetic moments when the Author has him draw an outline of the woman he lusts after in the sand, and then has him lay next to it respectfully if not reverently.

The book begins rather uncertainly and develops until the circumstances lead to extremes that are so different from the balance of the book they read as if almost separate. Helene's reactions to the events that make her life skid toward madness on this island, that at it's best is a psychotic red light district and theme park was the strongest part of the book. As I mentioned the story was not a thrilling one, but this ladie's writing is excellent, and I look forward to reading more.

Teeth of the Dog is an incredible collage of social commentary and whalloping emotional content. It reads like a skillful thriller. You become so totally absorbed by the characters that you begin plotting what you would do in their situations, wanting to warn them to be a tad more reasonable or a little less passionate. What's especially well defined is the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. Ciment's watertight prose and sensual detail drops the reader in such a vivid place, that you may check your passport to see if it's stamped "Vanduu." With a bleak humor, she shows how our American pop culture and imperialism have wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting innocent in third world counties. In Teeth of the Dog, our collective behavior has come back to bite us in the butt. I loved the character of Finster...he had perfect sleaze-appeal, the dark Adam of paradise. I also adored Ciment's other book, Half a Life, and find myself giving her books as gifts frequently. You'll want to turn everyone you know on to Jill Ciment! Warming: if you loan this book out you probably won't get it back.

This novel has much to recommend it. I loved the language and the story. Most contemporary fiction leaves me bored and I've taken to not finishing most of the books I start. But Teeth of the Dog was different. I couldn't put it down, and even though I finished it over a week ago, I still think about it. It's been a very long time since a novel did that for me.

I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I agree with the other reviewers here who found this lacking. Too much style, too little substance. Like imitation Graham Greene.

This book is a knockout. The story is about coming to terms with the death of someone you love, and I must say, having experienced grief myself, Jill Ciment got it exactly right. She writes about grief in all its permutations, the anger, the sadness, and the selfishness. I also loved the story, fast paced and exciting and very funny at times. Setting it on the South Seas Island of Vanuu, only adds to the feelings of displacement and loss.

If you crave beautiful writing, intense emotion, and nail biting suspense, you'll want to check out Teeth of the Dog. The story builds slowly, hypnotically, then suddenly you find yourself as swept up in the novel's dramatic events as the characters themselves. I've been to many third world hellholes and she got it just right. It was also very interesting to read this sort of story from a women's point of view. I think Jill Ciment's on to something new. Teeth of the Dog is both a thriller and a literary novel, the best of both worlds.

I loved Half a Life, but this book's even better. Not just a thriller or a literary tour-de-force, this novel presents an electrifying portrait of characters caught in a maelstrom. Cultural collisions and political upheavals make their lives interesting -- and magnified, to resemble (in extremis) our own. A must-read!

I stayed up all night reading this novel, I couldn't put it down. The writing was so beautiful, the story really gripping, and very sad, too. The island she describes was weird and awesome. If you like Graham Greene, you'll love this book!

This isn't literary, it's "literary." Ciment writes with one eye on herself in the mirror as the great writer, and it shows in every sentence. The plot limps along and everything that happens is signalled a mile away. If you're surprised by anything, it's your own fortitude that you've kept reading.

"Teeth of the Dog" is vividly written with respect to details of landscape of the out-of-the-way island, but it's finally disappointing. FINSTER, the pot-smoking California guy residing on the primitive Indonesean island, who's living the life of a druggy beach bum and small-time hustler, succeeds in his dream of bedding the confused tourist HELENE STRAUSS, whose sterile marriage to her cancer-stricken, dying husband makes her vulnerable and vaguely available to this weakling seducer. But their budding relationship doesn't add up to much, particularly since Helene never takes Finster very seriously. Moreover, Helene's difficulties as she finds herself wrongly accused of a little native girl's auto-accident death, and her subsequent escape from the island to avoid authorities, never give you the sense of a fully-worked out plot that provides thematic meaning. But, as said, the island detail is effectively rendered, and the novel does convey what it's like on exotic vacation islands of the type of Borneo or Java.