BUT. I read The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst yesterday. Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it yesterday. The book follows the story of a man who comes home one day to find that his wife has fallen out of a tree to her death, and as he searches desperately to understand what happened that day, he decides to try to learn what happened through the only witness to the event, his wife's Rhodesian Ridgeback, Lorelei. Being a linguist, he embarks on an effort to teach her to talk. I love to wander through bookstores and just pick up whatever happens to catch my interest. I picked this one up and put it back down twice before I finally decided to hang on to it. I already had The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart in hand, and I wasn't entirely convinced The Dogs of Babel would be worth the money. The premise sounded vaguely silly to me at the time, but I thought, hey it's under 300 pages, it'll be a quick read, might as well give it a shot.
I was very pleasantly surprised.
It is a very depressing book. Each chapter alternates between the bereft husband's efforts to teach Lorelei to communicate and his reminisces about how he and his wife first met, their week-long first date, and their marriage. The story is extremely sad and tenderly written, and has a very realistic feel to it. And despite a touchy point towards the last third of the book that I thought was a bit jarring and maybe a bit unnecessary, the end is absolutely phenomenal. And when I say the end is phenomenal, I mean the end is phenomenal. That last chapter just completely blew me away, and the last page nearly moved me to tears.
I promise I'm not generally one to get all that sappy about books, but this one really managed to touch me. I can't recommend it highly enough.
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