Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs.

• Author: Normey, Rob
• Position: Critical essay

Leonardo Padura is a Cuban novelist, known first and foremost as one of the most exciting crime novelists of our time. In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Padura presents us with an epic, Tolstoyan novel that mostly succeeds in the ambitious goals he has set for the work. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, arguably the preeminent political event of the twentieth century. Yes, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany is perhaps equally important, but we need to recall that his rise was in part made possible by the perceived need to allow such an unscrupulous, hate-filled demagogue a free hand so that the Communist menace, inspired by events in Russia, might be successfully destroyed. This novel is one of the few I have encountered that provides an adequate account of the myriad ways that the Revolution fought for by various idealists and scoundrels detonated around the world, with far-reaching effects in Third World countries like Cuba.

Our contemporary world is so different from the time a century ago when so many writers and ordinary citizens were convinced that only a political revolution and dynamic forces of change could bring the needed progress and justice to the tottering and seemingly decadent world that had emerged at the end of the First World War. Now, it is difficult for us to attain an adequate understanding of the hopes that emerged in the early years of the Russian Revolution. One of the exciting things about Padura's novel is the expert way he is able to integrate a narrative of the heady days, with all their promise, of the "Ten Days That Shook the World", to use the brilliant phrase of the American journalist John Reed, and the major reforms instituted by Vladimir Lenin and his key lieutenants, including Leon Trotsky, into the fictional tale told by his Cuban narrator, Ivan Cardenas. This narrative describes the dramatic arc which took Trotsky and his family and friends from the top of the political ladder to a shocking situation wherein he had been demonized and expelled from the country.

In gripping fashion, Padura is able to bring Trotsky alive, his fierce determination to see a world-wide revolution succeed and his growing fears for the fate of the revolution, all its gains jeopardized by the ruthless seizure of power by Josef Stalin, who undeniably betrayed the better prospects that the Revolution had once held. The novel builds in intensity in the period of 1939 and 1940, when Trotsky has...