When Ulises Kan's wife leaves Caracas and moves abroad without him, her father befriends him, and when the father-in-law dies, Ulises finds he has been bequeathed the bizarre task of turning the family mansion into a shelter for dogs.
The untranslatable word, simpatía, an intermingling of sympathy and charm, captures the kinship of stragglers and strays in the cleared-out Venezuelan capital. So too does it describe the Latin American electorate's enshrining of a long line of larger-than-life political figures, from Simón Bolívar to Hugo Chávez.
“Simpatía,” unreels in prose that is both more refined and more exuberant. A novel of men and dogs, “Simpatía” unearths the secrets of Blanco Calderón's native Caracas and finds humor and humanity in our monstrous, postlapsarian present.
