Sigrid Nunez: The Best Books About Dogs

By Little, Brown Book Group

Reproduced from an article written by Sigrid Nunez in The Wall Street Journal, May 2018.

'The idea of writing a Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel came to Woolf while she was reading the letters of the poet and her poet-husband Robert Browning. Woolf modelled Flush on her own pet spaniel, Pinka, and the book itself on the new, distilled, creative type of biography invented by her friend Lytton Strachey in his recent Eminent Victorians. Though the book includes much about the life of his mistress as well as incisive commentary about culture and society in Victorian England and Italy, the focus remains on Flush’s emotions, such as the jealousy that pierces him when “the man in the yellow gloves” eclipses him in Miss Barrett’s affections and the terror he experiences when he is stolen and held for ransom. From her observations of Pinka Woolf knew that her subject’s life was lived mainly through his nose. “Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell.'

Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Sara Baume

£9.99 £9.49

'In this first novel by an immensely gifted young Irish writer, a dog mutilated by one of the badgers he’s been trained to hunt is adopted by the narrator, a 57-year-old dysfunctional recluse named Ray. Both characters share a pathological distrust of outsiders but also an intense curiosity about the world, and, in Ray’s case, a keen sensitivity to natural beauty. Much of the narrative is addressed to the dog, One Eye, with an inexhaustible Ray pouring out his whole (unsurprisingly traumatic) life story as well as reflections about anything and everything that pops into his hyperactive mind. But what about the dog? What does he see through his “lonely peephole”? What does he think and feel? Baume endows Ray with both the capacity to imagine brilliantly One Eye’s consciousness and a rich, lyrical language to describe it. After months of intimate living together Ray realizes that he is “different somehow. I feel animalised. Now there’s a wildness inside me that kicked off with you.” Though we may fear the consequences of this transformation, we are made also to see that it is not without a kind of splendor.'

My Dog Tulip

J.R. Ackerley, J R Ackerley, et al.

£11.99 £11.39

'Those who doubt that a human-canine relationship can be as deep as the relationship between two humans are likely to have their minds changed by this love story between British man of letters J. R. Ackerley and his female German shepherd. Ackerley’s passion for Tulip and his determination to give her, at whatever cost to himself, the happiest possible life, make him a true romantic, not to say quixotic, hero. But it takes more than love to be a successful animal parent, and that both suffer from an anxiety at times approaching hysteria, above all in regard to her sexuality, makes for some uneasy reading. Ackerley’s ravishment by Tulip inspired much ravishing prose: “How beautiful she is in her shining raimant, her birch-bark body, her sable bodice, her white cravat, her goffered ruff. Exquisite the markings on her face … like the wing of a Marbled White butterfly.” It is to the coincidence of a most unusual man-dog story and an extraordinary literary talent that we owe this singular and indelible memoir.'

The Friend: Winner of the National Book Award - now a major motion picture starring Naomi Watts

Sigrid Nunez