In a police state, it’s a dog’s life
For almost a year now I have been conducting a correspondence of sorts with one of the dogs who lives with my sister and her husband in Ireland. His name is Milo, and though not especially brainy, he has a noble and generous soul and a kindly sense of humor. He takes aesthetic pleasure in rolling in fox dung and the other exotic salves and unguents so abundantly furnished by nature. This practice, he tells me, does not always go down well with my sister, though why he can’t say. Still, that’s not nearly so puzzling to him as coming across a copy of Robert and Brenda Vale’s “Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living’’ in the happy home. As my relationship with Milo was an Internet friendship, I did wonder at times if he was really what he made himself out to be, or whether he was an impostor - or even my sister? (The Web has made cynics of us all.) But when I actually met him last month, I discovered that though he was a dog of more barks than words, he could not have been more like himself if he tried. I saw, too, firsthand, how all-consuming the business of being a dog is, and how the world, as arranged by human beings, is both doubly comic and doubly tragic when seen from a dog’s point of view.
This far-from-original insight is transformed into an extraordinary novel in “Niki: The Story of a Dog’’ by Tibor Déry, translated by Edward Hyams, first published in Hungarian the summer of 1956. This version, with an introduction by George Szirtes, will be published next week (New York Review Books, $14.95). Set in Hungary, the book begins in the spring of 1948, the year that marked the start of the dictatorship of Mátyás Rákosi. The Ancsas - a 50-year-old mining engineer and a 45-year-old housewife - live in the countryside outside Budapest. Their son and Mrs. Ancsa’s father were killed during World War II, and the couple exist in a state of grieving endurance.
One day a young bitch shows up, some kind of terrier mix, whose name they later learn is Niki. Galvanic with life, she courts the Ancsas, beguiling them with her charms and entertaining them with that doggy sense of humor, which is expressed through acrobatics. “It was her carp-like leaps, straight up in the air, which were funniest. In dog language, no doubt, each of these leaps was a witticism which an audience of dogs would have greeted with laughter.’’ After a time and some trouble regularizing the dog’s ownership - Mr. Ancsa is a scrupulous man - the couple adopt her; though, as the narrator notes, there is, and always will be, some awkwardness between them. The Ancsas, after all, “had good reason to know that affection is not only a pleasure for the heart but also a burden which, in proportion to its importance, may oppress the soul quite as much as it rejoices it.’’ This is especially the case in postwar Hungary, where the ties of love, loyalty, and responsibility are constantly being severed arbitrarily by unseen forces.
At first life is good and fine days follow. Mr. Ancsa’s job grows in importance, and he feels he is playing a role in building a new society. Niki accepts the eccentric rules set down by her humans - no begging, no chasing chickens, no rolling in putrid substances. They are part of the order of life with the Ancsas, the more joyous elements being Mr. Ancsa’s return at a certain time every evening and, indeed, the entire, predictable daily routine. Niki, the narrator tells us, “was adapting herself with all her heart to the very comfortable world regulated by human morality.’’ And so the edge of irony that will increasingly dominate the book is decisively slipped in.
The Ancsas move to Budapest with Niki, and life becomes a confusing jostle. “It was,’’ the narrator tells us, “about a week after their establishment in Budapest that the engineer took in hand his bitch’s education, or rather adaptation to city life. As it happened, he had ample time, for he was no longer going to his office.’’ In this careless way, as an afterthought, really, we learn that Mr. Ancsa has been fired without explanation - though rumor suggests it was because he had dismissed a politically connected subordinate for fraud. Ancsa is now at the mercy of the system’s malicious whim, and so begins the family’s tribulations, each incomprehensible step revealed with chilling, off-hand casualness. The brute caprice to which the Ancsas are subject, and which I shall leave you to discover, is all the more inexplicable to Niki. As such, its vicious absurdity is further amplified as it relentlessly subdues her effervescence, which was so wonderfully evoked at novel’s start. It is Niki’s sheer dogginess, so perfectly rendered throughout, that is at the heart of this novel’s greatness. It is not a fable; Niki hasn’t an allegorical bone in her body. She is a dog in a dog’s predicament and is even more unaccountably the victim of the bad faith that deforms the world of men than are her owners.
I don’t have a dog; but I do have a noncustodial relationship with a raccoon-ravaged flock of chickens, now down to one rooster and his four wives. I don’t understand why raccoons, to say nothing of hawks, fisher cats, and weasels, can’t devote their expert killing skills to the voles who treat my garden as theirs. But, as one quickly learns, the life of the farmer is largely a matter of death and destruction. This lesson and others more cheerful (if less familiar to me) are learned again and again by Novella Carpenter and recounted by her in “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer’’ (Penguin Press, $25.95). The action, and there is plenty, including swarming bees and pigs on the loose, takes place in a decayed part of Oakland, Calif., where Carpenter takes up raising chickens, geese, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, bees, and pigs. She also farms a vacant lot dealing - or not dealing, as the case may be - with the usual animal predators, neighborhood pillagers, and the “urban farmer’s most dreaded pest, the real estate developer.’’ The book is entertaining and, though many of the animals have distinct personalities, it is pleasantly unsentimental. It is also filled with useful tips for anyone who might wish to take up this exhausting, often demoralizing, but commendable pursuit.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
