BLACK DOGS by Ian McEwan

I am not sure you can actually write a memoir for someone else, but that seems to be the premise here.  The first-person narrator not only proceeds to write someone else’s memoir, but he confesses that after his parents died and he went to live with his adult sister’s family, he often hijacked his friends parents, intentionally showing up at their homes while their son was away.  The same thing occurs with his attachment to his wife’s parents, and he periodically interviews his mother-in-law, June, to compose a book about her life, alongside her mostly estranged husband, Bernard.  Both June and Bernard embraced communism after WWII, but a terrifying incident involving two black dogs during their honeymoon sent June down a different path.  A couple of other acts of violence are committed in this book—one in Berlin after the wall comes down and one in a restaurant where a father viciously strikes his son.  The narrator witnesses both of these latter events, but June’s experience with the black dogs is not fully clear to the reader until very late in the book.  Until that point, although we know the impact that this encounter had on her life, the dogs are merely symbolic of evil.  June eventually shares her belief that evil that resides in all of us, and another anecdote regarding black dogs indicates that they are also an avatar for the Gestapo.  The thing that struck me most about this book is that, although we in the U.S. rarely think about WWII, Europe is still wary in its aftermath.