Novel Excerpt: “The Dog Fighter”

from The Dog Fighter, a novel by Marc Bojanowski
reprinted with permission from the author and his publisher
read the Void interview with Bojanowski here.

One.

In Mexico I fought dogs. I fought on a rooftop surrounded by bougainvillea and colorful shards of broken glass. Before the fighting I waited in a small room where bloodstained ragmen came hunchbacked from shadows to wrap my forearm in a heavy rug. Over my hand they placed a glove made to have metal claws. The leather of the glove softened with the blood and sweat of each fight and with each fight the claws were made more dull. When the ragmen finished wrapping the heavy rug they led me from the small room to a ring surrounded by yelling men. On these nights the ski of Canción darkened too slow for the eyes to see. The last of the sun always in the eyes and teeth of the dogs. Reflected into the ring from the broken glass buried in the walls. When the leashes were undone the yelling men stood shaking the metal fence of the ring. I crouched in silence and waited for the dogs to bark and show their necks. And then I tore at their necks with my claws. I let the dogs bite themselves onto the heavy rug so I could better put in their eyes with my thumb. Many times I snapped the bones of the small legs with my hands. I beat them in the heads with my fists. Once when a dog took me to the ground and went for my neck I caught her by the ears and dragged my teeth between his eyes to the end of its nose.

I was a young man when I fought dogs in Mexico. There were many dog fighters but none as great in size or as quiet. Then I was unsure of my words. But the fighting always was a language I spoke well. And the old men of Canción the men who have known fighting for as long as there have been dog fighters to admire placed upon me their most respect. These men spoke of my fights often and the stories they told of me then they still tell today. Of this I am sure.

Interview: Marc Bojanowski

The Void editors were lucky to catch up with Marc Bojanowski, author of the novel The Dog Fighter. Read an excerpt from the novel here.

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VM: What books did you read that inspired you to become a writer? Or was there a particular influence in your life that led you towards writing?

MB: Both. Like many other people, I come from a family of talented and experienced storytellers. I consider books to be a continuation of that narrative rich environment. As a boy I enjoyed the sports page and detective stories, namely The Three Investigators series. It wasn’t until high school and college that I began reading in earnest. There I was introduced to Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Melville, London, Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, McCarthy, Pynchon, Gaddis, Wallace and Poe. A fair bunch of talented craftsmen. As an impressionable young man born and raised in the USA, I admired the stories they told and how they told them. To this day, I’ve gleaned plenty from everything I’ve read. I figure this is how it, writing, works.

VM: Many have likened your writing in The Dog Fighter to that of Ernest Hemingway. Would you say his work had an influence on yours?

MB: No doubt. But I reckon that is a direct result of the general lack of familiarity with the works of Faulkner and McCarthy. Hemingway’s seed has been, I posit, broadcast to a far greater extent, to date, than both McCarthy or Faulkner’s. Influence is elemental to the evolution of craft. As an apprentice wordsmith working in the longstanding vein of fiction, and in the relatively short but rich vein of American letters, I gratefully acknowledge Hemingway’s influence, but would rather stress the names of those whose influence over my writing I consider to have been more significant and helpful.

VM: Did you spend much time in or researching Baja for The Dog Fighter? If not, then from where did you procure the information necessary to writing your novel?

MB: No, unfortunately I’ve never been to Baja. I pillaged books from the library, mostly old ones, all generous and questionable with their information.

VM: The landscape you created in The Dog Fighter was extremely vivid and intricately mapped out; it felt as though the reader could use your novel as a travel brochure to the fictional city of Cancion. How did you keep track of the locations, landmarks, and people in The Dog Fighter?

MB: I first drew a map on a bar using a straw and ice water. This was one quiet Monday night at The Pourhouse, in Brooklyn. I was acting mysterious so as to lure the attention of the bartender from all the other fellows who frequented the place to admire her Midwestern beauty. She smiled, and then told me to quit making such a damn mess. So the map was an accident, but, as I learned, integral the crafting of a story.

VM: You have mentioned your love for drama and poetry – how much of an effect did your background in these disciplines have on your writing of The Dog Fighter?

MB: You know how they ask people who you’d like to sit between at dinner one night? Well, for me, that’d be Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. I doubt they’d have much to say, but their words would be layered with meaning. We could invite Whitman too, just so somebody would be there to run at the mouth.

VM: You studied creative writing at The New School in Manhattan – to what kind of writers would you recommend pursuing an MFA?

MB: Serious ones.

VM: If you could recommend only one book on writing to our readers, what would it be?

MB: I’ve read Aspects of the Novel, by Forester. This was a while ago. I’d recommend reading everything and writing every day.