Duke, the Dog Priest

by Domício Coutinho, Clifford E. Landers (Translation)

Born in Brazil, novelist Domício Coutinho immigrated to the United States in 1959. His first novel, Duke, the Dog Priest , comically explores Nova Eboracense, Brazilian New York, with its dazzling mix of priests, brothers, nuns, students, church workers, parishioners, city luminaries, and a dog named Duke who wants to become a priest—making for a wonderfully fantastic novel.

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[George]

“The sacred, the mysterious, fables, mythology—all contained the same thing, their history, their magic. […] The Jews had invented the Bible; the Greeks, classical mythology; the Scandinavians, the saga of the Valkyries; the Arabs, the Thousand and One Nights. The Spanish have the image of El Cid implanted in their minds. The Portuguese even today ask what the world would be like in the Fifth Empire. The human mind is a wondrous factory for all myths.”

At first Duke, the Dog Priest gives the impression of being the Cien años de soledad of New York, yet its scope is not as expansive even if it maintains high ambitions throughout its nearly 500 pages. Another hint at its more contained scope is the title, which doesn’t have the lapidary quality of Gabo’s masterpiece nor fellow Portuguese writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s An Invincible Memory. Rather than encompassing the whole of the Big Apple, Coutinho focuses mostly on the members of a Catholic parish, turning New York into its dead-language counterpart, Nova Eboracense. However, his novel is no apologia. Instead, it often adopts a satirical and irreverent tone that would have many of the faithful foaming, “Blasphemy!” Coutinho not only acknowledges that natural and species-perpetuating phenomenon known as lust, something religion villainizes and oppresses, but he explores it at length, including lust in the loins of the anointed, for it’s one of the book’s major themes. The lesson could be summed up as follows: celibacy is against our animal nature, if not religion in its entirety.

Read the full review here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/07/3...

I interviewed the nonagenarian author here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/07/3...

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his village there was a jackass who was crazy about plums and who would respond with operatic whinnies whenever he was given the fruit. He would swallow the fleshy part and whinny with the stone between his teeth. He did this artfully, producing a bray unlike any ever heard. People would laugh. Discovering that the louder the laughs, the better the plums they'd bring him, he would keep quiet when they didn't bring him anything. But his heart would be in his throat whenever the neighbor's female donkey, called Susanna, passed by. Moved, she began responding to his impassioned whinnies, conducting the melody with her tail until she disappeared down the road.