When he comes home he finds his wife, Alexandra "Lexy" Ransome, dead, fallen from an apple tree. Paul Iverson called home to find a police officer answering the phone and suggesting him to come home. Like the builders in the story, Paul is hampered by the differences in communication between himself and Lorelei. The Dogs of Babel is an allusion to the Tower of Babel, the Biblical story that explains the existence of different languages. Throughout the book, Paul uncovers more about his wife's last day and remembers events through their life they led up to it.Įxplanation of the novel's title He is very troubled by this and therefore for the remainder of the book he is trying to teach the only witness of her death, his dog Lorelei, to speak. The book is narrated by Paul Iverson, a linguist who calls home one day to find out his wife is dead. The Dogs of Babel was the first book that Parkhurst wrote it was not the first novel that Parkhurst envisioned. It was one of The New York Times Notable Fiction & Poetry books of 2003.
The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong.The Dogs of Babel (also known as Lorelei's Secret in the UK) is the debut novel of Carolyn Parkhurst.
You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see.
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