Dog Years

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

In this tightly knotted, constricted novel, 30-year-old Vancouver writer
Denisoff tackles nothing less than what critic Stan Persky calls
life’s “starkest moral ambiguities.” The narrator, diagnosed as
HIV-positive, sits at his word processor in Vancouver and begins to
chronologize his travels to Kiev in the Ukraine, ostensibly as a student
but really to remove himself from his AIDS-infected lover and to
confront his obsession with his own death. The anonymous protagonist is
convinced that he will die in Kiev; his preoccupation with this
certainty results in nihilistic relationships with others, in particular
with a young Ukrainian man, Larion, whom he takes as a lover. The fact
that he knowingly infects Larion with HIV (and infects, as well, a train
porter and Larion’s sister, Marina) is a result of his increasing
inability to disassociate his own existence from death’s encroachment.
Though he has no reason to suspect he already has the disease, the idea
of AIDS has affected his thinking and his imagination, even if the
disease itself has not yet infected his body. His mind is dead; whatever
his actions, however cynical they might appear, they pale beside the
awful truth of his imminent destruction: “Sick and dying time time
time. This is all I have. I know now that the word for this dichotomous
entity is AIDS. It has always been AIDS, even before the plague was
recognized. It is this virus that guiltlessly devours, reaching its
ultimate glory at the moment of its own destruction. . . . I speak of
death as an all consuming divinity, with no ‘life and death,’ and
this is exactly what the AIDS virus is—a senseless, consistent,
constant power which can bring all people, and therefore all their
imaginings, to nullity. To zero silence.”

The narrator’s internal sense of doom finds an external correlate in
the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, to which he, Larion, and Marina are
exposed. Denisoff’s protagonist is trapped in a life that he cannot
hope to understand.