THE BITCH

The lives of a disobedient dog and its melancholy owner grow entangled in this allegorical novella.

The first novel published in English by the Colombian writer Quintana centers on Damaris, who’s living in a coastal town with an oft-absent fisherman husband, minding the home of the Reyeses, friends of her family. When she’s offered a puppy from a litter, the dog is at once a balm for her loneliness and a reminder of it: Unable to have children, she names the dog Chirli, after “the daughter I never had.” Chirli is an emotional trigger, and Damaris is soon recalling her failed efforts through healers to get pregnant and a moment in her childhood as she watched the Reyeses’ son get washed away by a large wave hitting a rocky shore. Every incident in this brief novel seems calibrated to show life’s tenuousness and violence: Humans and dogs die via gunshot, hatchet, and poison, and Damaris’ relationship with the dog frays as Chirli disappears into the nearby jungle, returning only to disappear again. Though the novel is short, Quintana patiently explores Damaris’ darkening mood, as Chirli’s untamed nature echoes its owner’s despair over keeping life under control: “Alone, totally alone, in a body that bore her no children and was good only for breaking things.”  As Damaris’ and Chirli’s lives take increasingly tragic turns, their restless natures feel increasingly broadly symbolic of the difficulty of domesticating ourselves and others, even when it serves our best interests. In an author’s note, Quintana said she was inspired by seeing a female dog’s corpse on her first day on Colombia’s Pacific coast. “I thought, there is a huge story here,” she writes. “Huge” overstates things, but it’s an intense story despite its brevity.

A somber and sensitive dog-and-owner tale scrubbed clean of the genre’s usual sweetness.