The Difficulty of Being a Dog
Roger Grenier Book Review

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Plot Summary of The Difficulty of Being a Dog

"This is a thoughtful, philosophical look -- in small, bite-size bits -- at the relationships between dogs and humans, and what humans have made of dogs in their writings. The "chapters" are more like Pascalian pensees: mostly two to three pages, but sometimes as short as a single paragraph. They discuss everything from dogs in dreams and famous literary non-appreciators of dogs, to ghastly historical incidents such as the rounding up and exile to an island of thousands of dogs so that they starved and ate one another, by the Turks in 1910. Grenier recalls many writers' real and fictional canine doings, but the accent is on French writers (the author has been an editor for the distinguished French press Gallimard), so unless the names Larbaud, Queneau, Mauriac, Valery, Chateaubriand, or Romain Gary mean a lot, you are apt to feel like a stranger at the cocktail party. It can come as a relief when Grenier returns to the concrete and relates incidents with his own dog, Ulysses. Elegant, erudite, but perhaps a little too heady for the American reader."
David Loftus, Resident Scholar

Review Analysis of The Difficulty of Being a Dog

Our unique search engine provides a wealth of detail about books by breaking them down into many different literary elements, all of which are searchable (click here).

Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Tone of book? - thoughtful
Animal story Yes
Kind of animal: - dog
Is this an adult or child's book? - Adult or Young Adult Book

Main Character
How sensitive is this character? - middling sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor - Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence - Average intelligence
Physique - average physique

Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings? - 3 ()
United States Yes
Europe Yes
European country: - England/UK - France - Germany - Spain
Asia/Pacific Yes
Asian country: - Russia

Style
Person - mostly 1st
Accounts of torture and death? - generic/vague references to death/punishment
Unusual Style: - No single main character?
Amount of dialog - little dialog

Most similar books to The Difficulty of Being a Dog
The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams
The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
The Dogs Who Came To Stay by George Pitcher
My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Birdy by William Wharton

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The Difficulty of Being a Dog
Roger Grenier Book Review