The Bridge of Suicide Dogs

Original language: castellano

Year of publication: 2023

Valuation: High recommendable

I generally don’t usually read those books that are displayed in the ‘Humor’ section. Although I understand that there are those who look for a book with the sole intention of laughing and having a fun time, I see it differently, I believe that humor has to be present in a story when it should, only at certain moments and in some proportion, which will be greater or lesser depending on the case, but never all the time. It does not seem reasonable to me that one has two hundred pages ahead of them, for example, in which each line and each paragraph has to contain a joke, an occurrence or an irony. That must be very tiring. Or not.

The Bridge of Suicide Dogs is the new novel that John Kennedy Toole writes when he reappears in New Orleans, half a century after having committed suicide by inhaling the exhaust fumes of his car. In reality it seems that he has spent all that time trapped in the Guinea, what we would call Purgatory, a kind of intermediate station towards death, from which for some reason he has returned (or from which he has been expelled). Ken wakes up, relatively perplexed, among garbage cans, having somehow blended in with the famous Ignatius Reilly, the protagonist of his novel The conspiracy of fools. Although he soon realizes that his book has finally been published, and with great success, it will not be easy for someone to recognize him as the true revived author. The more or less comical or absurd adventures in which he is involved make up the bulk of the story, involving cartoonish characters, such as the owner of a restaurant for tourists where she has a Harvard graduate as a helper, the John Kennedy Worshipers Club Toole, hidden in the back room of a workshop, the librarian who secretly writes novels, or the sergeant Mancusodaughter of the patrolman who led such a bad life in Toole’s popular novel.

Humor, indeed, is present on every page, but not gratuitously but replicating in a quite astonishing way the style of that old best-seller, its prose, the type of gags, the naturalness and childish abruptness of its protagonist, to the point of way of connecting the sequences, or the indirect but relevant role of the city of New Orleans as another character, its neighborhoods, its metal bands, Santeria or aromas. Amutxategi recreates all of this with apparent ease and, more importantly, without ups and downs, maintaining the tone and rhythm from the first to the last page. Something difficult to achieve, a narrative always focused on what it wants to be, a parody so well constructed that it can be seen as a recreation.

Same as in The conspiracy… Also here the story presents other interesting layers under the humorous wrapper, especially the terrible satire directed towards the publishing world. As is known, Toole committed suicide without any publisher wanting to publish his book (perhaps because ‘they didn’t believe there were enough readers interested in what it had to offer’), and only after his death did his mother get him to see the light. Taking this as a starting point, and perhaps also some more personal experience, Amutxategi once again places the North American author in a similar situation, and takes the opportunity to distribute wax against publishers who despise everything that is not immediate profitability or send manuscripts without reading them. , or against the self-publishing promoters who squeeze the poor author, who does whatever it takes to see his name on something in the form of a book. Although a little in passing, it also touches on the old dilemma of the ownership of the text, to what extent it remains the author’s or where it begins to belong to the reader, as an individual or as a collective. Sarcasm is not spared, but it is always relevant and measured, without letting the narrative get out of control or deformed.

Everything seems perfectly combined and adjusted, without potholes or gaps, a balanced narrative thread that sometimes makes you laugh, without losing pace, leaving the feeling that its author is very aware of what he wants to achieve and how to do it so that everything, the history, jokes, criticism, and what it has as homage, which also function as an ideal mechanism for this purpose.

If John Kennedy Toole did indeed raise his head again, he would almost certainly write something very similar to The Bridge of Suicide Dogsfantasizing about his own resurrection and his new novel, and so on.