The anonymous narrator of this remarkable debut novel is a young drifter in search of his future. The son of a passionate beauty and gentle doct... read full description
reviews
Sep 10, 2009
Johnfx750
rated it: 
Shocking tale that doesn't apologize for its disposition and lays it out flat. Grabs you from the first chapter til the last with no holds barred...if you are a dog lover do not read this book !
This is just a precursor to what you are going to encounter with this book... as it bares your own account and how you will digest it. The dogfighter tries to find his manhood in bravery and wrestles with newfound love as only a dogfighter can... Its a wretched story with a painful love song More...
This is just a precursor to what you are going to encounter with this book... as it bares your own account and how you will digest it. The dogfighter tries to find his manhood in bravery and wrestles with newfound love as only a dogfighter can... Its a wretched story with a painful love song More...
Nov 02, 2008
Will
rated it: 
The narrator of this tale is a young man whose mother has just died. He is violent, urged on by the voice of his grandfather, a primitive. He is a murderer, a harsh uncaring soul eager to prove his strength at any cost. He is used by a woman to kill her lover, then flees to a remote part of Baja Mexico. It is there that the action of the tale ensues. Cancion is a sleepy place, but one in which the future is the prize in a war between a mafia-like developer and the anarcho-literary types who want
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Jan 30, 2012
David
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Though this book can be stylistically mannered, eschewing commas for example, it was entertaining and pleasurable to read. I enjoyed being fully immersed in the author's macho, emphatic language and living in the scarred and caloused skin of the main character. I chose to interpret the storytelling and setting as mythic rather than documentary. As far as realism goes, my more Latin culture-savy friends felt that The Dog Fighter misrepresented Mexico, even to the point of racism. It certainly
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Dec 31, 2007
Martin
rated it:
I put this book down several times to gather dust before I finally willed my way through it. I'm not a person put off by violence and love books and movies that drip with it. Blood and gore in copious amounts is surely my forte and this book is jam packed with it; think Fight Club with dogs.
To be honest I can't really nail down one reason I didn't love this book. The main character never really gets any where. He doesn't seem to learn anything. His internal struggles stay in par More...
To be honest I can't really nail down one reason I didn't love this book. The main character never really gets any where. He doesn't seem to learn anything. His internal struggles stay in par More...
Dec 16, 2009
Frank
rated it:
I generally feel that, in a work of fiction, messing with things like structure and getting creative with punctuation are a waste of a good writer's craft. It doesn't matter how clever you get with these, what matters is solid things like story, character, perspective, and the general arc of the story. I felt this way when I started reading this book. It wasn't until I was nearly done with it that it struck me how much of the chosen grammatical structure of the work contributed to it. It certain
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Apr 26, 2008
Tara
rated it:
First off, there isn't really war in the political sense, but there is war in this book, so the shelf classification stands.
For a first novel, this is brilliant. The story takes a lot of interesting turns. A lot of people have griped that the protagonist doesn't really evolve, doesn't "go anywhere," and for those people I have one word: Hemingway. This book is way Hemingway-esque. If you don't like the guy, why did you open a book that has his name on the cover? (It's a quo More...
For a first novel, this is brilliant. The story takes a lot of interesting turns. A lot of people have griped that the protagonist doesn't really evolve, doesn't "go anywhere," and for those people I have one word: Hemingway. This book is way Hemingway-esque. If you don't like the guy, why did you open a book that has his name on the cover? (It's a quo More...
Oct 03, 2008
Jason
rated it:
The Dog Fighter (Perennial, 2004) takes some getting used to. In a counterintuitive move, Marc Bojanowski’s debut novel contains the bare minimum as far as punctuation is concerned. You will find no quotation marks, commas, dashes, colons, semicolons, ellipsis, or any other helpful forms of punctuation. Instead, aside from marks native to the Spanish language (accents, etc.), you will only be given words, periods, and question marks. Does that make for a clunky, awkward reading experience at fir
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Jul 27, 2011
Rose
rated it: 
I didn't like this book until I was about 50 pages in. I think it;s a good book for a book club, plenty to discuss and leaves you with a few things to think about.
May 01, 2008
Andrew
rated it:
This book surprised me. I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but this was a really good book. I'm not sure if it was the relatively sparse dialogue or the way the author describes everything, but more than any book I've read in a while every time I opened it it was like taking a little vacation. Spending some time in a quiet little town in Baja. The protagonist is intentionally despicable throughout the beginning of the book, but he grows on you. The ending was unexpected and perfect, with
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Dec 16, 2009
Travis
rated it:
brutal, raw, visceral (literally and figuratively),graceful in its violence, somehow nostalgic. hemingwayesque in structure and device. debut novel, always an attractive quality- interesting to glimpse and speculate on a young writer's motivations. wish i had the onions to live as the anonymous narrator.
Apr 30, 2008
Cormac
rated it:
This book is both beautiful and brutal. Surreal and terrifyingly real. Only a writer with the rarest of gifts could create a main character and give him no name, set the story in 1940's Mexico, and have the reader completely invested from page one.
Aug 31, 2010
Patrick
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Bojanowski effectively transports the reader to another time and place, and into the mind of a character most people are never likely to encounter. This book is as much about change as it is about violence, and sometimes change is violent.
Jan 30, 2012
Eric
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Man this is a hard charger for fans of Cormac McCarthy and the likes. Violent, passionate, poetic...good. I did not want to have to put this book down.
Jan 30, 2012
Jessica
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A beautifully written book even though it is difficult to read at times because of the subject matter it's absolutely worth it.
Jan 30, 2012
Angie
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One of those great finds where I thought the cover looked interesting at the library so i picked it up. An amazing story.
Jun 09, 2008
Tony
rated it:
Not bad, picked it up on a whim. Funny how books can turn into a love story of sorts. So it goes.
Jan 30, 2012
Christopher
rated it:
Once I caught the flow (punctuation irregularities), I was enamored with this tale.
Feb 10, 2012
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