Description
A bizarre tale of passion and romance between a schoolteacher and a dog, from the incomparable National Book Award-winning Yoko Tawada
Masterfully turning the rules of folklore and fable on their head, The Bridegroom Was a Dog is a disarming and unforgettable modern classic. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from The New Yorker, which praised it as a “fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka.”
The Bridegroom Was a Dog begins with a schoolteacher telling a fable to her students. In the fable, a princess promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. The story takes an even stranger twist when that very dog appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a doglike man. A romantic — and sexual — courtship develops, much to the chagrin of her friends, who have suspicions about the man’s identity.
Reviews
"“Her masterpiece”" — The New York Times
"“Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.” " — Sara Baume
"“Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.”" — Madeleine Thie
"“Tawada is, far and away, one of my favourite writers working today—thrilling, discomforting, uncannily beautiful, like no one you have ever read before.” " — Laura van den Berg
"“There is a matter-of-fact strangeness to [Tawada's] work that transports the reader without being escapist or overly fantastical. It is experimental writing that comes in at odd angles, peeling apart the familiar and unfamiliar... A strange and entrancing tale that shifts and surprises from paragraph to paragraph .”" — Ronan Hession, Irish Times
"“A precondition of Tawada’s writing is that reality and language exist in extravagantly fluid relation. In its comic sensual impossibility, this fantasia [The Bridegroom Was a Dog] makes you realize that Tawada has absorbed not just a Japanese tradition of magical narration, but a German-Jewish tradition of transformation.”" — Adam Thirlwell, London Review of Books
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