“I killed a dog in Romania”: with Claudia Ulloa Donoso an identity search “on the road”

In his debut novel, I killed a dog in Romaniapublished by Polidoro in the series The savages, Claudia Ulloa Donoso, Peruvian writer born in 1979, he stages a road trip original and full of possibilities reflection.

The protagonist is a woman Latin American who teaches Norwegian to foreigners. In Norway he becomes friends with the Romanian Mihai, a bus driver, who assiduously attends his courses in an attempt to integrateto feel less alone in a place that is at times very inhospitable and, who knows, perhaps in the hope of one day being able to make a relation sentimental with her.

There depression of the woman is clinical, this forces her to stay in bed for long periods, in a immobility total, stunned by drugs and often also by alcohol. To lift her up and shake her from this condition Mihai invites her to travel the streets of Romaniahis country of origin, in a mysterious and long voyage in which the boy will have to complete a mission that concerns the death of his father, and an ancient one promise made to a friend.

The two friends are on board a Dacia, suspended between a past of identity search in a land that hosted them but not fully welcomed them, and this new present made of smells, concrete, neon lights and the brutality of a land that still juggles in the dark and raw folds of a dictatorship lasted almost twenty-five years, they grind kilometers waiting to meet the destiny by Mihai.

Mihai who now goes by the name of Mihai in the land where he was born Ovidiualmost to underline the impossibility of escape fate. Because you can choose yours identity only and exclusively in the place where you decide to live, while on the contrary the place where you were born imposes an identity on you.

Meanwhile the Professor fights with her parents demonsbetween days of dullness and sudden leaps forward of vitality, must search, in a place where tongue is completely foreign to her, to understand who that friend she has only half-known really is.

And this is where the central node of this beautiful novel.

A language pushed to the limits of a novelist’s possibilities, almost as if, in the end, it was the investigation itself radical on the novel form and on the possibilities of literature what really interests the author.

It seems that Claudia Ulloa Donoso has really introjected the lesson Of Noam Chomsky. What is the tonguewhere it comes from, our abilities to understand all are innate structures grammaticalare they universal?

But most importantly, it’s really the language that informs the world and what shocks our identity is subjected to when we return to tongue mother.

It is no coincidence, in fact, that precisely at the moment in which the protagonist begins to have some type of confidence with the Romanian language, to understand entire conversationsto get closer in a deeper way to the reality in which the friend grew up unknownloses the ability to articulate sounds, just as happens to children who practice different languages ​​from birth.

There comes a time when you have to act silenceto produce a again meaning.

And that’s where we meet the dog, declared in the title. A black dog in need of care, dirty and emaciated, to whom tranquilizers are put in the mouth so that he falls asleep. A black dog that becomes a shadow stuck to the heart and then dissolves into new ones possibility.

“At that time, you enjoyed the trip? Yes, I replied. What did you like most? I thought of a line. The black space and the white line. The white space and the black line.
The first line: the street».

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