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His Life as a Dog
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20251 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
2,280 Words |
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Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier
Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier is professor of Spanish and Latin
American literature at St. John's University in Jamaica, New
York. She is the author of Interviews With Spanish Writers
(Dalkey Archieve Presss, 1991), Interviews With Latin
American
Writers (Kalkey Archive press, 1989), and Gabriela Mistral,
the Teacher From the Valley of Elqui (Franciscan Herald
press,
1974, originally published in 1973 by Editorial Crespillo in
Buenos Aires as Gabriela Mistral, la maestra de Elqui). She
is coauthor with Zenaida Gutierrez-Vega of the book Carmen
Conde de viva voz (Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1992). |
LE MARI QUI ABOIE
Laurence Salacrou
Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1990
214 pp.
Laurence Salacrou is not new at writing. The daughter of Armand Salacrou, the French playwright who became famous in the 1930s, she began writing children's stories under her married name, Laurence Delaby, and published more than a dozen tales about the lives of young Parisians. A woman with two professions, she divides her time between writing books and working at the Musee de l'Homme as an ethnographer specializing in Siberian shamanism. About those two separate worlds, she told me this: "Writing has a therapeutic effect on me. It is like keeping a diary and expressing what I deeply feel; it comforts me. Shamanism, on the other hand, fascinates me, and I enjoy studying the magic encountered among tribal peoples. I couldn't live without these two words I have made for myself. Without them I would feel incomplete."
Le mari qui aboie (The husband who barks), her first novel, is inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Circe, the enchantress who metamorphosed men into animals. Like Circe, the protagonist, Louise, takes pleasure in turning her husband, Max, into a dog. A brilliant and sensitive man, Max plays along with her in his desire to please. Once a prominent businessman, he is now unemployed; Louise takes advantage of the situation to dominate him. It is her unavowed way of avenging her mother, who, throughout her married life, had been under her husband's yoke. Louise gets caught at her own game, however; when she sees Max debased, ridiculed by others, she rushes to his defense, protects him, and, to her great surprise, discovers that she truly loves him. Her words of endearment are all evocative of the animal kingdom: mon poulet (my chick), mon lapin (my bunny), mon chat (my pussycat), and mon chien (my dog).
Published in Paris by Calmann-Levy in 1990, Le mari qui aboie is a touching love story spliced with strands of magic, reminiscent of fairy tales, where fantasy constantly interferes with reality. It is also a novel of suspense where spies and intrigue mingle, as in a James Bond movie. The whole story, however, is triggered by a problem very close to home, that of unemployment, with which Max is unable to cope. As Salacrou writes:
Max in his shabby raincoat. Max in his unpolished shoes. It breaks Louise's heart just to imagine him with the newspaper sticking out of his bulging pocket filled with white
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