The representation of perverted utopia in "The man who loved the dogs", the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura

• Main Author: Maria Analice Pereira da Silva
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Universidade Estadual de Maringá 2016-07-01
• Series: Diálogos
• Subjects: Narrador; Romance; História; Cuba
• Online Access: http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/Dialogos/article/view/32270

In "O homem que amava os cachorros", the writer Leonardo Padura develops a narrative architecture that highlights one of its primordial elements – the narrator – considered as relevant to the representation of the theme in focus: the compassion, as an unfolding of what the narrator himself names as “perverted utopia”. This work limits itself to offer a possible reading-key to the interpretation of narrator Iván’s actions, who is also the main character, and the reflections that he presents about the facts he narrates, and that, direct or indirectly, are related to the theme in focus. We comprehend, then, that through this reading-key, it is possible to notice the representation of a human condition, through the figure of narrator Iván, whose vision, in its intrinsic relationship with the place he occupies and represents on the romantic space-time – Cuba in the decades of 1970/80/90/2000 – formalizes, aesthetic and dialectically, the several faces of compassion, even when he considers other adverse feelings.