When his beloved Bernese mountain dog died, Cédric Sapin-Defour experienced the kind of grief normally prompted by the death of a close family member, reports The Sunday Times.
After taking several years to come to terms with his loss, he set out to write a book: not so much a lament about Ubac’s death as a celebration of his life, or rather, of their life together over 13 years. It would be as if dog and master could enjoy one last nostalgic walk through the mountains of Savoie, just as they had done so many times before.
The result, entitled Son odeur après la pluie (His Smell after the Rain), has turned the unassuming school sports teacher into the most unlikely French literary sensation of the year.
Le Point magazine called the book “the revelation of summer”. Another reviewer hailed it as “balm for the heart”, while a writer for Le Monde praised the author for tackling a societal taboo: mourning a pet. “Any excess of sadness seems suspicious, the sign of a worrying psychological fragility,” she wrote. “Some do not hesitate to see this deviant love as a sign of a rejection of the human species.”
Despite a modest first printing this spring of just a few thousand, this not-so-shaggy dog story has gone on to sell more than 150,000 copies, chasing far better known literary names from the top of the bestseller list. It is being translated into six languages, including Chinese, with an English version likely to follow.