Uncover The Color Of A Dog Running Away Assembled By Richard Gwyn Format Ebook

what an odd little book, Its been picking up praise in the press and even became Waterstones word of mouth book for the summer.


I read it and was quickly immersed in the settings, style and characters of a beneath the surface modern Barcelona.


The main protaganist is Lucas who is writing his story of how he responded to a card pushed under his door and met a woman at an art gallery.


They start on a love affair but then he gets kidnapped by a group living in the mountains that believe that they are resurrected cathars who were murdered in theth century.
His girlfriend is there as well and they live for a while in peace until it all gets nasty and he is tried for the treason of crimes supposedly committed in theth century!

He escapes and holes up with a number of expats drinking and relating the story, revealing more and more.


High on style and atmosphere it ultimately fails as a thriller and becomes a chore to plough through.
Which is a shame. Tripe. Don't waste your time.

The characters, plot and language are all underdeveloped and extremely uninteresting, Nuria's character is wholly inconsistent, Lucas is mental and his friends irritating so who really cares what happens to them The plot attempts to be original, but merely batters cliche with elements that are ordinarily left out because they're so dull.
The language would be great if this was a GCSE English assignment,

Thank god it was fairly simple to read so it was over and done with quickly.
This book committed my number one pet peeve, which is that it failed to make me care about the characters, and also failed to make me see why any single character liked or cared about another.


I didn't see any reason that Nuria would actually be in love with Lucas, almost every character seemed to be very impressed with how painfully bohemian yet full of jaded ennui he/she was the human connection between Lucas and his "friends" was all but invisible, only one character Eugenia drew my interest in any way and her role was relatively minor.
The characters seemed to be voluntarily isolated not only from each other, but from the world at large, and I'm not certain why they would ever have become acquainted in the first place.


I found the dialogue unrealistic, even for characters who are meant to be "artistic" and therefore could be excused from a bit of pretentiousness and there are several unwieldly exposition dumps, which is another pet peeve.


The description of Barcelona was good and not more detailed than it needed to be, though having never been there, I can't say if it's an accurate picture of the city.
This started off really well for me I whipped through the first quarter and couldn't wait to see where it would go next but then it just sort of plateaued for me.
I found it got a bit too surreal and a bit repetitive and the central character really started to bug me with his obsession with self.
Great location and potentially a great reflective tone but perhaps the plot events didn't gel with the rest for me.
You wait for ages, hoping for a book about the reincarnation of members of a Christian sect from the Dark Ages, and then two come along at once! See 'The Gargoyle'.
What are the chances

This one tried a bit too hard to be postmodern and what was meant to be a playful narrative felt stilted and mannered.
Still, I learned a few facts about the Cathars and the title is cracking, Not a bad book just rather inconsequential, I picked it up mostly because it takes place in Barcelona, I can understand a lot of the more negative views posted here, The book is often quite pretentious and positively dripping with fashionably existentialist navalgazing and obscure, enigmatic characters and situations but I still liked it, dammit! I'm a sucker for offbeat novels with skewered love stories and loads of calculated bohemian angst.


Most of all I like it because it reads like a tribute to my favourite novel, John Fowles The Magus another book with a glamorous European location, a selfish, quasiintellectual hero, a mysterious, manipulative girl, and an older mentor/madman playing god and indulging in dangerous mindgames.
I don't return to many books these days, but with this one I just might, Cor de burro quando foge é o nome do título em português I won't be reading this again, that's for sure.
I didn't find the characters interesting, The plot was pretty bland and the writing is unfledged with tedious details, You know, I just don't know about this one, I liked it it was kind of intersting to be taken around Barcelona, never having had much interest in Spain, . . I did find the stuff about the Cathar's interesting, . . and still it kind of left me flat, I had a few suspensful moments, moments of curiosity, . . but still not enough to get too awfully excited about, Lots of talk, little coherent plot, and characters that the reader learns nothing about, I think this author likes to show off, Many high minded sounding thoughts and conversations, but they really don't fit together to make a story or tell an interesting point of view.
When I opened the door of the flat there was a picture postcard lying in the hallway.
It showed a reproduction of a painting by Joan Miró, I turned the card over, Neatly written, in green ink, was what appeared to be a date and time:May:, There was no explanatory message, no indication of who had written the card, The printed details told me that the reproduction was entitled “Woman of the Night, ” The painting could be found at the Miró Foundation, Maywas the next day,


Lucas, a musician and translator living in Barcelonas Gothic Quarter, comes home one day to find this cryptic invitation.
When he appears at the appointed time, he sets in motion a series of bizarre, seemingly interconnected events that disrupt his previously passive existence.
He meets the alluring Nuria and they begin an intense love affair, He is approached by a band of Barcelonas mythic roof dwellers and has a runin with a fireeating prophet.


But when he and Nuria are kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenthcentury, Lucas realizes that his life is spinning out of control.
The cults megalomaniac leader, Pontneuf, maintains that Nuria and Lucas are essential to his plan to revive the religion.
While Nuria is surprisingly open to Pontneuf and his theories, Lucas is outraged and makes his escape, Back in Barcelona, Lucas wanders the streets in a drugandalcohol induced haze, pining for Nuria and struggling to make sense of what happened to him.
He recounts his improbable adventures to his friends, who are wholly entertained by the story and deeply dubious of its truth, an understandable skepticism as Lucas fast becomes the quintessential unreliable narrator.



With the alluring and enchanting Barcelona as a vibrant backdrop, The Color of a Dog Running Away is a love story, tale of adventure and historical thriller all rolled into one unforgettable and mesmerizing package a novel that will beguile and disturb in equal measure.
I purchased this book in Mayfor a good reason, which I immediately forgot, Eighteen months later, I blew off the dust and read the flyleaf, It's about some guy in Barcelona who receives an anonymous postcard that leads to a torrid love affair with Nuria and their abduction by a religious cult, from which he escapes but she stays, and he returns to Barcelona where, in a drug and alcohol induce

daze, he tries to figure out what happened.
The flyleaf also mentions roof dwellers and a fireeating prophet, Except for the lastpages of the novel, that synopsis tells the story, Nevertheless, the tale has elements of a mystery,

THE COLOR is the first novel by a poet, I classify it as general fiction with perhaps a literary treatment, I say perhaps because I'm too lazy to understand poetry and I suspect there is meaningful theme in this story that other readers will grasp.
That theme is likely related to a statement by the character Igbar Zoff on page: "The point is that out of any situation, whether disastrous or not, can spring unforeseeable benefits.
" I think the author was foretelling,

This being a first novel I proceeded with caution, For quite many pages, the author seemed to be painting the seedy characters and backstreets of Barcelona where tourists should not go or they will be mugged.
Indeed, a tourist mugging is the first scene after the prologue, There are other scenes unrelated to the plot or subplots, Descriptions are sensual, adjectives used liberally, poetically perhaps, But it is interesting. The author lets us see, feel and smell Barcelona's dirty underwear, At times, the author approaches magical realism but then decisively withdraws, It might be surreal, but he makes it plausible,

And it works, The flyleaf told us the plot, so with patience and fortitude we wait while the author carefully constructs a foundation on the rubble of Barcelona, which teaches us to accept quirky happenings.
So by the time the baldheaded megalomaniac drips water on the trussed up protagonistnarrator lying in a coffin, we are certain it could happen.
.