The Difficulty of Being a Dog

Reviewed by Richard Bernstein

New York Times

Dogs -- man's loyal, uncritical best friend and so forth. But dogs are also reflected upon in literature, in philosophy and in speculation about the human relationship to the rest of the world. When Freud lay on his deathbed, we are reminded in Roger Grenier's charming little book, "The Difficulty of Being a Dog," he wanted to see Lun, his beloved chow. "Terrified of the odor of cancer," Grenier writes, Lun "refused to go near him and cowered in a corner."

What are we to make of this?

A dog afraid of a bad odor? Elsewhere, Grenier observes that dogs, with their vaunted olfactory equipment, are interested generally in rank, fecal, unpleasant smells. Citing the writer Henri Michaux, he writes that dogs are "cognoscenti of foul odors." Anyway, how would anyone know that it was the odor that terrified Lun since, presumably, the dog didn't say so? In other words, there seems to be a lack of scientific rigor in this matter of Lun and the fear of cancer.

But in fact Grenier's main point lies elsewhere. It is in the contrast between Lun's abandonment of his master in his last days and the canine loyalty that presumably he had shown up to that point.

"What other messenger could have made it so clear," Grenier concludes, "that he was no longer part of life, that he had just crossed over to death?"

Animals or animal-machines?

Grenier, a well-known novelist and essayist in France, recounts many stories about the significance of dogs to men and women, and offers some interesting ruminations on the nature of dogs themselves -- whether they are, as Descartes had it, animal-machines, for example, or just animals. The 43 frugal essays that make up this volume, translated from the French by Minnesota-born author Alice Kaplan, a professor of romance languages at Duke University (and a National Book Award nominee this year), are literate, light and lighthearted. They make up a kind of anthology of literary musings about dogs based on Grenier's extensive readings in everything from Faulkner to the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki.

Grenier's essays are also a bit skimpy -- a more favorable reading would call them understated, elliptical, epigrammatic. He never does, for example, tell us what Descartes meant exactly by animal-machine (though we can guess). The essays, some as short as half a page, could have been arranged in almost any order without making much of a difference in their literary effect. But Grenier is an engaging and clever writer, and, even when he gets away with saying too little, he does manage to say something of interest.