The Dialogue of the Dogs
"Ever since I could chase a bone, I've longed to talk...."
The first talking-dog story in Western literature—from the writer generally acknowledged, alongside William Shakespeare, as the founding father of modern literature, no less?
Indeed, The Dialogue of the Dogs features, in a condensed, powerful version, all the traits the author of Don Quixote is famous for: It's a picaresque rich in bawdy humor, social satire, and fantasy, and it uses story tactics that were innovative at the time, such as the philandering husband who, given syphilis by his wife, is hospitalized. Late one feverish night he overhears the hospital's guard dogs telling each other their life's story—a wickedly ironic tale within the tale within…
Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain in 1547, the son of an impoverished barber-surgeon who may have been a minor noble—or posed as one. Little is known of Cervantes' life until, at 23, he went to Italy—by some accounts, fleeing justice after a duel—to join Spain's war against the Ottoman Empire, losing his left arm in the Battle of Lepanto. Sailing home, he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers. Eventually ransomed by his family, he returned home in 1580 deeply in debt to his rescuers. He published an unsuccessful novel, La Galatea, married a woman twenty years his junior and, denied permission to emigrate to the New World, became a tax collector.…
