An old man retired to Italy takes in a stray dog to keep him company in his exile. Until one day a Bosnian man comes to stay and take a dislike to the dog. Black humour.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes

My Goodreads rating: 4 of 5 stars


Depressing, horrifying, tragic, full of love, regret, optimism. The magic of everyday and extraordinary life, romantic, amazing, absorbing, a novel which is composed of the story of one man and his dog interspersed with vaguely linked (but not always) short stories which lead you down the garden path and make you want to read more, now. Whatever you do, don't imagine that this is going to be a story with a happy ending. The title echoes 'Lassie Come Home', but if you're expecting a cross between a redemptive story of the love between a man and his dog, I'm sure the local bookshop or library can recommend something; this most certainly isn't what you're looking for. If you enjoy dark, black books which talk about the joy and hope of deep, everlasting love which blooms fast but is left only as a memory, dashed by the twists of cruel fate, read on! Something tells me Simon Pegg and Dan Rhodes could collaborate to make amazing film.

The book is full of memorable characters and incidents, rather like a modern-day and international Scheherazade (with fewer nights and less treasure). Strangely, many of the characters don't have a name, and there's a theme of misfits, cross-cultural relationships, love between young and old, the beautiful and the flawed, doomed not by the obvious differences but by terrible accident or simple realisation that it was not to be. Such memorable characters! Cockcroft himself, his memories of lost loves, especially the boy in the silver shorts and the mysterious and cruel Bosnian. There's the Welsh girl who followed Enrico to Rome. The professor who fell in love with May in China and their daughter, Mai, never really Italian, no longer Chinese. The intelligent deaf girl Aurora and the way her love changes her petty criminal boyfriend, until... Somehow we know this isn't going to end well, and it doesn't, but for a while, the tale is one of perfect love and we hope that nothing will change.

"They filled notebooks, exercise books, ledger books and odd scraps of paper with their words. Everything, from their first conversation, was preserved - every revelation, every sad story of happy memory, and every banality. Words which for other couples would vanish almost immediately from memory were preserved as though they were museum pieces. [...] The only things they didn't write down were the words that didn't have to be said."

Dan Rhodes isn't going to let us sink into this mire of Disney happy-ever-after, however, and the tale takes a ghastly turn. Then we move on to other tales of despair. So we learn of the perfect love of the parents of a severely handicapped girl, Rosa, who spend their lives waiting for her to smile. A new boy at school, rootless and friendless because his father moves on frequently due to his ball-bearing job is cruel, but learns his lesson. The dog, Timoleon Vieta, occasionally appears, linking the stories, often in a tenuous way, by coincidence. He appears in a Cambodian girl's photo, so we jump to Cambodia to hear the tale of her younger sister's unrequited love for her brother's friend and discover why the love is unrequited.

There is humour here, too, but most of it is not of the laugh-out-loud variety, though Cockcroft's method for reviewing the local expats' efforts at telling of the trials of joys of living in Umbria made me chuckle. Cockcroft himself is living a life of regret and depression after a public disgrace (not related to his homosexuality) and a string of lovers. Now his only companion in his retreat in Umbria had been the dog with the beautiful eyes, but his Bosnian lodger, also hiding from something, cannot make friends with the dog and Cockcroft, afraid of being left alone with his suicidal thoughts, agrees to dump the dog, allowing him to roam and touch other people's lives. Thus begin his travels and his attempt to come home. Things will never be the same.



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Meegenomen naar de boekenweek meeting in Oss.
Dit boek is losgelaten voor de volgende BookCrossing challenges:
- The Ultimate Challenge - boeken lezen en loslaten, met bonuspunten voor een maandelijkse thema.
- Reduce Mount TBR (To Be Read) - lezen en loslaten van TBR boeken die al voor eind 2014 op de plank stonden. Mijn leesdoel is 36 boeken.

Will start reading it and will see if I also finish it ;)

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