The situation that Fifteen Dogs describes, the gods influencing the dogs, was one that was particularly vivid to me because I have a love for animals, but maybe even more particularly because I have a love for animal stories.' Moreover, Alexis claims that, in writing the novel and giving personality types to the dogs, he consulted his own memories with various dogs while also endowing the dogs with elements of both his own emotional experiences and those of people he knows. I really, really liked that, and I wanted to re-write that story in some way. The novel is thus an apologue, a fable in which animals play the main roles and in which there exists a clear moral that is nonetheless conveyed subtly.Īlexis claims that he was inspired to write the book after watching Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema: 'In Teorema, a god comes down to earth, interacts with and influences a family and then leaves them, and we watch the result of that bereavement.

The kinship, anger, and confusion that the dogs feel concerning one another is the primary subject of the novel, and it easily segues into a broader discussion about the essences of humanity, nature, life, and knowledge. For example, one dog uses them to lead, another shrinks away from them, and one even becomes a poet. Each dog reacts to and uses their abilities for a different purpose. The dogs use their new abilities to escape and set up a social structure within a coppice of a nearby park. The gods have had a disagreement about whether animals could be happy if they had the same cognitive faculties as humans, so to prove their respective points, they perform an experiment in which they gift fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic the capability to talk, think, and understand language. Specifically, F ifteen Dogs tells the story of a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo.

Fifteen Dogs is the second novel in André Alexis' planned five-book series, The Quincunx Cycle-each work of which is centered around the philosophical themes of faith, love, place, power, and hatred.

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis