The Colour of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

Paperback, 2006

Status

Available

Tags

fiction

Genres

Description

Lucas, a musician and translator living in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, comes home one day to find a cryptic invitation to a local art gallery slipped under his door. When he appears at the appointed time, he sets in motion a series of improbable, seemingly interconnected events that disrupt his previously passive existence. He meets the alluring Nuria and they begin an intense love affair. He is approached by a band of Barcelona’s mythic roof dwellers and has a run-in with a fire-eating prophet. But when he and Nuria are kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenth century, Lucas realizes that his life is spinning out of control. The cult’s megalomaniac leader, Ponteuf, maintains that Nuria and Lucas are essential to his plan to revive the religion. While Nuria is surprisingly open to Ponteuf and his theories, Lucas is outraged and makes his escape. Back in Barcelona, Lucas wanders the streets in a drug-and-alcohol-induced haze, pining for Nuria and struggling to make sense of what happened to him. He recounts his improbable adventures to his friends, who are wholly entertained by the story and deeply doubtful of its truth, a skepticism that is exacerbated by Lucas’s tendency to use the third person and flaunt different narrative styles. A love story, tale of adventure, historical thriller, and evocative tour of Barcelona, THE COLOR OF A DOG RUNNING AWAY is a dazzling blend of the surreal and the ordinary, a novel that beguiles and disturbs in equal measure.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Quickpint
Well I thought it was cool, and clever. Shades of Borges. Will be forcing a copy on at least one of my mates. Great prose, too. If you approach it with the understanding that it's a kind of upmarket, modern-day Dennis Wheatley, you'll enjoy it tremendously.
3 more
LibraryThing member wandering_star
The digested read: I am too authentic to life to stay living in England with uninteresting English people. Beautiful, mysterious women perceive this and fall in love with me.

Ugh.
LibraryThing member jayne_charles
There was a sense of anything being possible in this very poetic, superbly written book set in Barcelona. You never really know where it's going next (unless it's to another bar: there can't be too many drinking joints in the Gothic quarter that aren't frequented during the story). The supporting
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 cast - members of the expat community - are described in colourful and hilarious fashion, and the descriptions of Barcelona itself are perceptive, and a joy to read: "There was an edge of muted excitement in the air. Barcelona often seemed like that: a city on the brink, infatuated with its own improbability. I loved these twisting alleys, the syncopated snatches of music drifting out from open windows, the long shadows, even the perpetual odour of an antique drainage system overlaid with sand, cement and cheap cigar smoke."

The story reminded me very much of one of my favourite books, John Fowles' 'The Magus', in the sense that neither the reader nor the narrator can quite figure out what is going on. It achieves exactly the right combination of reality and the surreal. Like 'The Magus' I suspected there would not be an explanation for everything come the end, and just like 'The Magus', I didn't care. Writing as good as this I could go on reading indefinitely.
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LibraryThing member jayne_charles
There was a sense of anything being possible in this very poetic, superbly written book set in Barcelona. You never really know where it's going next (unless it's to another bar: there can't be too many drinking joints in the Gothic quarter that aren't frequented during the story). The supporting
Show More
 cast - members of the expat community - are described in colourful and hilarious fashion, and the descriptions of Barcelona itself are perceptive, and a joy to read: "There was an edge of muted excitement in the air. Barcelona often seemed like that: a city on the brink, infatuated with its own improbability. I loved these twisting alleys, the syncopated snatches of music drifting out from open windows, the long shadows, even the perpetual odour of an antique drainage system overlaid with sand, cement and cheap cigar smoke."

The story reminded me very much of one of my favourite books, John Fowles' 'The Magus', in the sense that neither the reader nor the narrator can quite figure out what is going on. It achieves exactly the right combination of reality and the surreal. Like 'The Magus' I suspected there would not be an explanation for everything come the end, and just like 'The Magus', I didn't care. Writing as good as this I could go on reading indefinitely.
Show Less

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