Readings in Russian Civilization: Russia before Peter the Great, 900-1700, Vol. 1 Book

This book might not be very well known, so unlike with all these other books I don't have time or need to write about, I feel I should say something about Roger Grenier's strange and beautiful little work. I learned of it from Alexander McCall Smith, who endorses it in 44 Scotland Street. I'll take anything McCall Smith recommends seriously. His canine character in the Scotland Street series, Cyril, is as convincing and endearing an urban dog as any I've come across in literature. Grenier's book is neither novel nor memoir, even though it purports to be about his relationship with his dog Ulysses. The original French title, Les larmes d'Ulysse, The Tears of Ulysses, may refer to Grenier's own dog'maybe to his sadness about his minimal role in this book. But in fact it refers to the moment in The Odyssey when Odysseus (Ulysses in Roman adaptation) has returned to Ithaca after about twenty years of war and wandering. Home at last, he finds his faithful hound Argo, too old to get up (I guess so; he must be more than 20 years old!), who nonetheless recognizes his master and wags his tail. Seeing this, Odysseus sheds a tear or two before going off to fight the suitors hitting on his (equally faithful) wife, Penelope. The French title, with its literary allusion, is much more appropriate than that of the English translation, since what Grenier does here is to assemble a literary survey of the representations of dogs in literature (especially French literature) and the relations of authors and dogs. Given that Grenier is a longtime editor for Editions Gallimard and a much-published author himself, a total book guy in other words, who better to offer such a bookish little book? The vignettes and almost aphoristic commentaries are compact, with occasionally more extended readings'for example of Virginia Woolf's Flush, of which I wholeheartedly approve. Descriptions of Paris and doing stuff with Ulysses? A few passages, but not as much as I'd like.