Funeral for a Dog Book

Life is a spiral; not a line.

Daniel Mandelkern, a German journalist, puts this in a postcard to his wife/editor, who has sent him to Lake Lugano, Italy to write a 3,000 word piece on reclusive children's book author Dirk Svensson. This conclusion comes to him after spending a lost weekend at Svensson's ramshackle lakeside cottage, drinking Bombay gin by the glassful, smoking incessantly, lusting after Svensson's lady-friend, Tulli, and watching Svensson's three-legged dog, Lua, slowly die of old age.

Mandelkern lives an orderly life with his wife Elizabeth in Hamburg. She is his boss at work and at home - having insisted that he abandon his ethnology studies to work as a writer at her magazine. She is older than he is by five years and was married when they first got together. We see in flashbacks that she is sexually aggressive and dictatorial. At the outset of the novel, they have had an argument (possibly about having children) and he leaves for the assignment in Italy abruptly without settling things.

When Mandelkern arrives at Svensson's place, the house is a shambles, the power is out and there is a mass of broken down furniture (including a smashed computer screen) piled in the front garden. Svensson is completely evasive, often leaving Daniel alone with Tulli, a visiting Finnish beauty from his past, and her young son. Early on, the stark contrast between Daniel's very structured life and Dirk's boho excesses had me expecting some sort of a Teutonic version of Zorba the Greek and, while this assessment isn't entirely off the mark, Funeral for a Dog is much darker and more complex than that.

Working with only sparse notes, a copy of Svensson's children's story, The Story of Leo and the Notmuch, and without the author's cooperation, Mandelkern is completely frustrated until he discovers a hidden manuscript written by Svensson which details his days in New York and South America with Tulli and their deceased friend, Felix Baumeister. In between bouts of covertly reading the memoir, Mandelkern draws on his training as an ethnologist (a sort of ethnic anthropologist) to blend into Svensson and Tulli's lives in hopes of establishing an angle for the article that will satisfy his wife, but he actually comes away from the experience learning more about himself than Svensson. He realizes that a life cannot be summed up in 3,000 words, that people cannot be so neatly categorized, that things aren't always as they seem and that life is a spiral; not a line.

* Warning: This book depicts scenes of animal cruelty - including a graphic cockfight, descriptions of how medics experimented on dogs in Vietnam and the amputation of Lua's leg. Not for everyone.