_The Dogs of Babel_

[nancylebov]

_The Dogs of Babel_ is the first and only novel by Carolyn Parkhurst.

A linguist's wife has died under circumstances that might be a really weird accident or might be suicide--she fell from the top of their apple tree and the only witness was their Rhodesian ridgeback dog.

He decides to try to teach the dog to talk enough to tell him what happened.

Everything in the story has a mundane explanations, but it's got rather a lot about Tam Lin, there's a weird cult of guys who are trying to surgically alter dogs to make speech possible (don't read this book if you can't deal with bad things happening to dogs), and there's a small possibility that telephone psychics occasionally have real powers.

I'm not sure whether I'd recommend it. There was so much about emotions that I began to feel suffocated--I'm not sure whether I was dealing with the conventions of a for-women genre that I'm not familiar with, or just that it's a reasonable representation of a man who's pretty isolated and who's grieving hard.

On the plus side, the prose is good, many of the images are vivid, the efforts to teach language to the dog are plausible and sometimes funny, and it's interesting to see a book that's neither in the genre nor quite out of it.

Any recommendations for other books that aren't quite sf?

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order won the Tiptree, but one could argue that it's not sf. (Whatever it is, it's a good one.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I read a review elsewhere about the new Philip Roth that sounds like it's not quite sf, but really is...that is, it's an alternate history novel (damn I wish I could remember the title, but it just came out) in which Charles Lindberg ran against Roosevelt and won in 1940, allied with the Evil Axiz, and so America is a kind of anti-Semite fascist state.

The reviewer said that when Roth writes about people he's brilliant, but when he does the world-building aspect he's so very clumsy, it's clear he's laboriously trying to invent a wheel long since smoothed by the better writers in our genre.

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

_The Years of Rice and Salt_, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Alternate history - the pivot is the Black Death killing 95% of the population of Europe instead of 35%. China and "Al Arabiyya" are the dominant world powers; Buddhism and Islam are now the major world religions. The story is told through the eyes of a cadre of souls who are reincarnated together in various eras (as per Buddhist theology.)

The cultures depicted, both historical and projected, are fascinating and well-developed.

On a completely different note, _The Free Lunch_ by Spider Robinson. This book is utterly light-weight, and not in a way you'd expect from Robinson. There are no puns, for one thing. The protagonist is a 12-year-old boy, for another. (Kingdom of Loathing players can snicker knowingly here.) He decides to "go underground" and live at a feel-good theme park (insert all of Robinson's favorite authors here) where he makes a friend, stumbles into a conspiracy, and saves the world. Awww. How cute.

Absolute fluff, but it was a quick read that I enjoyed.