Jonathan Garfinkel

Jonathan Garfinkel's In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark was released on February 1, so this review is coming a bit late. If this title hasn't yet made it onto your radar, let me assure you that it should. It begins a bit slowly, but builds into a complexity that attempts to understand the politics of Georgia, the former Soviet Republics, and its people from multiple perspectives. There are many messages in this book, but no one message beyond, perhaps, "Things are complicated, and we need to see them in their full complexity."

In a Land without Dogs Cats Learn to Bark opens with the arrival of a U.S. Fulbright scholar at Moscow State University (MSU) in 1974 and continues through to Georgia's "Rose Revolution" in 2003. The Fulbright scholar becomes friends with a left-leaning group of students at MSU who are all jazz aficionados. Moving forward the novel focuses on the daughter of two of these students, whose mother has disappeared and whose father has left her to be raised by another family. This father is subsequently killed when rioters occupy a former KGB office. She's a performance artist married to a lifelong friend who works as an investigative reporter. She's befriended by a Canadian academic who is supportive of Georgians' struggle for democratic government. The performance artist travels to Canada, meets the son of this scholar, and they build a close relationship. The son has never known his father who committed suicide when the boy was young. This lack of family gives the two a reason for bonding, and both of them mourn not having known their fathers.

This summary may be a bit long-winded, but it only shows the context of the novel and doesn't give away crucial action or characterizations. The novels events take place in multiple nations on multiple continents; the identities of the characters reveal layer after layer, onion-like in their structure.

I know very little about the history of Georgia—or any of the former Soviet republics—so I can't assess the accuracy of the novel's portrayal of political and historical events aside from saying that while reading I experienced this story as "true" in the way fiction can illuminate truths. Garfinkel provides a very interesting afterword that clarifies his own experiences in Georgia and that also comments on the current war of aggression against Ukraine.

I've given this book a five-star rating and those stars embrace its characters, plotting, and relevance to our current historical moment. This is a title that belongs on TBR lists, that readers should be purchasing from independent bookstores or requesting from their local libraries. The reading experience it offers is profound in multiple ways.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.… (meer)