The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe - Hardcover

O'Hagan, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151013721 ISBN 13: 9780151013722

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

Synopsis

Meet Maf: The hilariously opinionated, well-read, politically scrappy, and complex canine companion to Marilyn Monroe.

In November 1960, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn Monroe a dog. His name was Mafia Honey, or Maf for short. Born in the household of Vanessa Bell, brought to the United States by Natalie Wood’s mother, and given as a Christmas present to Marilyn the winter after she separated from Arthur Miller, Maf was with Marilyn for the last two years of her life, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, and he had as much instinct for celebrity and psychoanalysis as he did for Liver Treat with a side order of National Biscuits. Marylin took him to meet President Kennedy and to Hollywood restaurants, to department stores, to interviews, and to Mexico for her divorce. Through Maf's eyes, we see an altogether original and wonderfully clever portrait of the woman behind the icon—and the dog behind the woman.

About this title

Review:

A voraciously original travelogue through the American century, a love letter to modernity, and a hilarious and often tender insight into the monster of celebrity. O'Hagan's portrait of Sinatra has to rate among the finest and funniest ever written ... O'Hagan has created a comic genius ... Glorious. --Evening Standard

A subtle, funny and moving study of America on the eve of one of its periods of greatest crisis ... Maf the canine savant is a shrewd observer of the modern age and of the American century, a veritable Tocqueville for our times. --John Banville, Guardian

An absolutely delightful, stylishly written, gorgeously lyrical novel. The Life And Opinions ... is his fourth and best yet. --Herald

It's staggering, joyous and somewhat unnerving that [O'Hagan's] new book, in a classic critic-confounding way, should be anarchic, over-the-top, irreverent and gleeful. There is an elegiac undertow, but one that only serves to make the dazzle and delight all the more piquant. --Scotland on Sunday

[One of} the best novels I have read this year ... his crowded and deleriously wonderful comedy of ideas ... O'Hagan has stupendous fluency and sanity, together with a slightly surreal reliance on autobiography.
--New Statesman

Book Description:

An utterly unique new novel from one of Britain's most exciting literary writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0151013721
• ISBN 13: 9780151013722
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277