Tale of a Dog: From the Diaries and Letters of a Texan Bankruptcy Judge
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0811213951 / Publisher: New Directions, January 1999
Judge Caldwell of Austin, Texas sees his comfortable life thrown in disarray as the town is flooded from heavy rains, he begins an extramarital affair, his daughter moves home with her young son, and a revered scholar's death is shrouded in mystery
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The judge and protagonist of this roman noir is Erwin Caldwell. The year is 1992, and the rivers in and around rain-soaked Austin are flooding their banks. The life of the city is thrown into confusion, and Judge Caldwell, a comfortably married man for thirty years, has an affair with the owner of a small bookstore. His stepdaughter returns home after being denied tenure at Harvard, her little boy in tow, and Judge Caldwell learns of the death of drowning of the Dutch philosopher-semanticist Jan van de Rouwers, revered by a generation of Texas university students. Murder or suicide? Van de Rouwers has been discovered to have been not a World War II Resistance fighter as supposed, but a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite apologist. Caldwell, who is Jewish, ponders the disconcerting turns of history and life in Texas. And what does this all have to do with a dog? Thereby hangs the tale...
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