Word: jiang
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...face of it Wolf Totem - rendered by renowned translator Howard Goldblatt - seems to be the kind of bildungsroman that many could relate to, telling of how boy becomes man, and touching on themes of environmental degradation and the conflict between tradition and modernity. Based on Jiang's experiences as a student volunteer living with nomadic Mongol herders in the 1960s and '70s, the 500-page tome is packed with descriptions of life on the steppes, ranging from the predatory behavior of wolves, to an explication of the sex lives of marmots. "It is an extremely Chinese book," says Lusby...
...Well, yes and no. Readers may find some of Jiang's purplest prose indigestible. "Desperate cries rose from the herd as the wolves tore into one horse after another - sides and chests spurted blood, the stench of which drove the crazed predators to commit acts of frenzied cruelty," is his description of a wolf attack on a herd of prize horses. "The raw meat in their mouths meant nothing to the wolves: only the murderous tearing of horseflesh mattered." More problematically, the book contains puzzling chunks in which Jiang details his pet theory: that thousands of years of farming have...
...Jiang's attempts to marshal modern history to conform to his ideas result in some passages that will strike many readers as far-fetched, if not downright silly. They also prevent a simple enjoyment of the book - its pleasant pastoral passages are sooner or later interrupted by jarring expositions that wouldn't look out of place in a 19th century manual of eugenics. Here's one from the novel's main character, Chen Zhen...
...Despite this sort of encumbrance, Jiang says he is confident that the book will find a mainstream Western audience, and believes that foreigners may even "be able to understand the point I am trying to make about freedom and independence better than many Chinese." Perhaps his faith in Western civilization - he names Jack London's White Fang as his favorite novel - is a vehement reaction to everything that modern China has done to him. Jiang says that one of the reasons he went to Mongolia in 1967 was because its remoteness would allow him to bring along banned "bourgeois" literature...
...this is the kindest reading one can make of Wolf Totem - that of a howling if confused paean to liberty, born of sublimated political frustrations that millions of Chinese can relate to. "In 20 years, I think it is inevitable that China will evolve into a freer society," says Jiang. But curiously there is no such optimism in the book. The wolves - those symbols of perfect freedom - are exterminated by officials as part of a plan to turn the grasslands over to large-scale farming, and Chen Zhen, the protagonist, can find only hackneyed, metaphysical solace as he meditates upon...