(3 of 5)
Here's a strange fable--if it has talking animals, it must be a fable--that clanks awkwardly in its mechanics but leaves a melancholy stillness as it is put back on the shelf. Kirsten Bakis' supposition in Lives of the Monster Dogs (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 291 pages; $23) is that in the year 2008, a tribe of large dogs, surgically and genetically altered, with prosthetic hands and voice boxes and with the intelligence of humans, arrives in Manhattan. The dogs walk erect, using canes, and wear costumes patterned after military uniforms and ball gowns of 19th century Prussia.
A journalist, Cleo Pira, befriends the dogs and learns their story. Their transformation began a century before, in the crazed ambition of a German surgeon to develop a race of unstoppable soldiers. This Dr. Frankenstein immigrated to the Canadian wilderness, where he and his successors botched generations of malamutes and Great Danes before the dogs revolted. It is this science fiction that clanks: author Bakis, 29, asks the reader to be literal-minded in accepting the surgical wonders, and then piles up so many that common sense balks. Could prosthetic hands, replacing cut-off paws, ever play Chopin? Could they ever stop hurting?
This pervasive pain, however, may be what makes the author's ending, a skillful interplay of sadness and mystery, work as well as it does. The dogs, who are quite rich, build a large castle, delighting and diverting human residents of New York City. But their tortured bodies are beginning to fall apart. Alone in his apartment, a brilliant German Shepherd named Ludwig von Sacher reverts to dog behavior--scratches on the door, piles of feces on the rug--then recovers enough to write in his journal, "I am alone in the world, a ludicrous animal." So are they all alone, and so they die. This diminuendo is unnoticed, except by the journalist Pira, who notes that the attention of the busy world has drifted elsewhere. --J.S.
WHOSE LIFE IS IT?
Hallucinating Foucault
Several schools of literary theory hold that readers have no business being interested in the private lives of authors; words on a page are utterly distinct from their creators, and the words are what matter. In Hallucinating Foucault (Ecco; 175 pages; $21), Patricia Duncker plays entertaining variations on these arguments and on the relationships between readers and writers.
Her unnamed narrator is a 22-year-old Englishman studying for an advanced degree in French literature at Cambridge. He is working on a thesis about the novels of a writer named Paul Michel, who emerged in the 1960s as "the wild boy of his generation." The narrator is more interested in Michel's cool, classically restrained fiction than in his public role as an outspoken homosexual. In fact, the narrator seems unaware of the fate of the real Paul Michel until his Cambridge girlfriend tells him that Michel was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in 1984 and has been held ever since in one or another French mental institution.
Before he quite knows what has hit him, Duncker's hero finds himself in Paris, "having been chosen for reasons I did not understand" to rescue Michel from his captivity. Eventually he succeeds, and then succumbs to the confusion of author with text: "Paul Michel and the hidden drama lived in his texts were utterly and terribly fused."