We never expected to find a work as upsetting and also exciting. Tibor Déry, that I did not know, managed a tour de force that left me speechless. He can make plausible, perfectly just, the look of a dog on the lives of men, without ever lapsing into anthropomorphism: his dog is a real dog, he does not need to pay it a thought or something What he has his own feelings, his dog behavior, his way of being, far from ours; and yet we quickly became very close, fraternal. And this look is a great novel find, in that it shows us human life (the life of Nikki masters, subject to the arbitrariness and violence of the Soviet regime) as we have never seen, as a poor history, an absurd story and at the same time, overwhelming. Innocence contemplate evil: it is explosive. A great book, it was time to discover.
