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Dingo (novel)
Encyclopedia
Plot summary
Completed by Mirbeau’s long-time friend Léon WerthLéon Werth
Léon Werth was a French writer and art critic, a friend of Octave Mirbeau, then of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.Léon Werth wrote critically and with great precision on French society through World War I, colonization, and on French "collaboration" during World War II.Saint-Exupéry met Werth in 1931...
, when the author’s ill health prevented him from writing the concluding chapters, Dingo, Mirbeau’s final novel, appeared in completed form with Fasquelle in 1913. An autobiographical fiction, Mirbeau’s tale chronicles the author’s adventures with his pet dog Dingo while simultaneously offering a jaundiced view of country life, in Ponteilles-en-Barcis, a squalid burg modeled on the village of Cormeilles-en-Vexin, where Mirbeau had had the misfortune to reside.
Commentary
Carrying on in the same vein as La 628-E8La 628-E8
La 628-E8 is a 'novel' by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, published by Fasquelle in 1907. La 628-E8 is noteworthy for its genre indeterminacy. Part travelogue, part fantasy, part cultural commentary and critique, Mirbeau’s book highlights its own unclassifiability: “Is it a...
, in which the hero of the novel had been Mirbeau’s automobile, Dingo again takes a non-human as its central character, the marauding, untamed creature that assumes mythical proportions in Mirbeau’s book. Uncorrupted by social institutions, endowed with animal good sense, Dingo exposes the vices, duplicity, and venality of the local autochthons while also instructing his “master” in the virtue of living in harmony with the instincts.
Despite praising his dog, Mirbeau offers an unromanticized image of the predatory beast, whose displays of goodness and affection are offset by murderous rampages, his wholesale slaughter of sheep and chickens. Herein Mirbeau shows that man and animal alike obey the “law of murder”, whose operation Mirbeau had described in Le Jardin des supplices (Torture Garden
The Torture Garden (novel)
The Torture Garden is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau and was first published in 1899, during the Dreyfus Affair...
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Because of the indeterminacy of its genre affiliation, because of its decentering of the masterful human subject who acts as a confident narrator, Mirbeau’s novel shows how completely he had broken with the conventions of realist fiction.