Word: totem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...funny thing to have hanging under the branches of stately old Harvard trees. The tire swing has become the pagan totem of our spring rite, and we—its fanatics—flock to it out of simple glee or hipster irony. Like a hypnotic pendulum lulling away the vulgarities of everyday stress, the tire swing beckons us to Yardfest in a more complex way than the food monopoly and in a more subtle way than the rap stars. One can imagine Yardfest without the dining services’ cornucopia, without the spectacle of saccharine country and ironic...
...copies for their employees, and the book quickly spawned a host of self-help and management texts that claimed to be imbued with its spirit - works with titles like The Wolf's Way, Wolf Soul, The Cool Wolves, Think Like a Wolf and Wolf Strategy. Illegal reproductions of Wolf Totem, of course, were rampant. No one knows the exact number of pirated copies sold but usual estimates are between five and 10 times the authorized version, which sold around 2 million. Total sales in China could therefore be as high as 20 million...
...thing: a searching song of the ascendant Chinese nation, seeking to know itself. The U.S. had its Whitman and Thoreau; China has Jiang, wandering the huge grassy expanses and singing of primordial elements - blood, death, soil - to which the nation is no longer attuned. "The heat caused by Wolf Totem ... is a symptom of Chinese people's collective depletion of spiritual belief," wrote critic Zhang Hong in the highbrow Wenhui Readers' Weekly. "The book is like a stimulant injected into the decadent contemporary spirit that allows people to fantasize about becoming aggressive and successful." Fittingly, those are the very qualities...
...advance for the English-language rights (company policy is not to comment on such issues, Lusby says) - respectable by the standards of international best sellers but an out and out record for China. Lusby believes it will prove a commercial hit, and on the 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...
...Ultimately, 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...