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(What a coincidence. The second novel about the assassination of Leon
Trotsky published recently.)
NY Times JAN. 21, 2014
Trotsky’s Pursuer Finds a Pursuer to Call His Own
‘The Man Who Loved Dogs’ Centers on Trotsky
By ALVARO ENRIGUE
THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS
By Leonardo Padura
Translated by Anna Kushner
576 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $35.
If Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” turned the
romance novel into literature, and Mario Vargas Llosa, with
“Conversation in the Cathedral,” applied French 1950s nouveau roman
techniques to the political thriller, the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura,
known for detective thrillers, has made his entrance to the Latin
American Modernist canon by writing a Russian novel.
“The Man Who Loved Dogs,” published in Spanish in 2009 and now appearing
in an English translation by Anna Kushner, tells the story of the exile
of Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and the Soviet people’s
commissar for foreign affairs, who was assassinated in Mexico on Aug.
20, 1940. Its Russian quality comes not only from its length — almost
600 pages — and the fact that it returns constantly to Moscow, but also
from its Tolstoyan passion for historical trifles and Dostoyevskyan
pleasure in examining the moral life of its characters.
In the summer of 1940, someone identified as a Belgian named Jacques
Mornard infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle and, during a visit to his
house in Mexico City, sank an ice pick into Trotsky’s head. Despite
having just had a hole punched in his skull and half of his brain
perforated, Trotsky — a survivor of Siberia — knocked down, subdued and
disarmed his assassin. And then he collapsed.
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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
Mornard spent the next 20 years in a Mexican prison. In the 1950s, the
Mexican police discovered his real identity: His name was Ramón
Mercader. He was Spanish, and he’d been trained by the K.G.B.
Mercader’s story is worthy of the wildest espionage thrillers. He was
transferred to Moscow from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Once
there, he was transformed into an ideal Belgian. He was sent to Paris so
he might seduce Trotsky’s confidante, the New Yorker Sylvia Ageloff.
Then he was shipped off to New York, with a Canadian identity, and, from
there, he established a phantom company in Mexico City, where he finally
accomplished his task.
After serving his 20-year sentence, Mercader returned to a hero’s
welcome in the Soviet Union. There he married the Mexican Stalinist who
had been his link with the K.G.B. during his imprisonment, and he lived
until his early 70s in a luxurious building overlooking Gorky Park. He
spent his last years in Cuba, where he died in 1978.
“The Man Who Loved Dogs” recounts Mercader’s life in counterpoint to the
cat-and-mouse game that Stalin played with Trotsky from the moment
Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 until his murder.
And it was a cruel game: Even as his agents closed in for the dramatic
ice pick checkmate, Stalin permitted himself the luxury of keeping
Trotsky alive long enough to learn about the murders of most of his
children and many other relatives.
In addition to the parallel stories of Mercader and Trotsky, “The Man
Who Loved Dogs” has a third voice, a Cuban one. Iván Cárdenas is a
frustrated writer whose life explodes when, in 1976, walking on the
beach, he meets an exiled Spaniard who may be Ramón Mercader. Through
him, Iván, once kept in the dark by the Cuban government’s policy of
“programmed ignorance” for its citizens, learns about 20th-century
history, reads Orwell and Trotsky and becomes aware of the horrors of
the Stalinist era.
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Leonardo Padura Itziar Guzman/Tusquets Editores
Mr. Padura’s novel tells this triple story without ever abandoning the
general conventions of fiction. More concerned with the emotional life
of its characters than with their historical roles, the novel still
imparts a sense of reality, thanks to its deft handling of an
astonishing quantity of information about Trotsky and Mercader’s lives.
This doesn’t impair the book but it does make it a serious reading
project: There is an almost courtroom rhythm to Mr. Padura’s
storytelling, as if an urgent need to offer evidence had overwhelmed his
ability simply to present the macabre dance between the victim and his
assassin.
The three alternating stories resonate with one another, acquiring
deeper meaning as they paint the complete fresco of a political
paradigm’s downfall. Mr. Padura suggests that his three main characters,
though playing very different roles, end up victims of the machinations
of a system that discards them when they stop being useful. All thre
