Title: Wolf Totem: A Novel
Author: Jiang Rong
LC Rating:
Every once in awhile I find myself reading a book that is just so impossibly true that it depresses the hell out me and compels me to continue reading non-stop thru the day until my eyes are strained, my nerves frayed, and my sense of indignation has been brought back to the forefront to the point that I feel like screaming at people. I imagine you’re currently scratching your heads and asking how it is that someone can actually enjoy this process. I loved this book, because it’s not just a book; it’s a weapon.
Ideally it’s the kind of weapon that one could employ by combining it with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America and using the resulting heft (hardcovers work best) to bash at the shins of anyone who refuses to see the inevitable result of our ‘advanced’ agricultural practices. Well, in all fairness it’d probably be better to try and get these people to read these books first, but having just finished a cathartic chunk of hours being made suitably miserable by the raw and uncompromising beauty of Wolf Totem, I’m in the mood to lash out a little bit.
But allow me to back off the harshness a little bit and attempt to give you a decent reason or two to read the book. Well it’s an award winner and what’s more heartwarming, it has apparently outsold any other book in Chinese history except for Mao’s little red book, which looked at from the context of the novel is pretty god-damn hilarious, at least if you’ve got a sense of humor anything like my own.
Wolf Totem is set in Mongolia in the 1960’s, during a period when the lives of the indigenous nomadic herders is being upset by the needs to meet production quotas for the cultural revolution. Our narrator is a Chinese student who has been exiled into this community for some subversive something or other, and after two years has begun to take an interest in the beliefs of the nomadic people, specifically how their lives on the grasslands are held together by the wolves.
The dramatic thrust of the novel is held together by our narrator’s decision to raise a wolf cub, and the struggles he encounters in trying to maintain his position in the community despite bringing this very unorthodox idea to fruition. As the impossibility of attempting to ‘domesticate’ a Mongolian wolf becomes increasingly apparent, the entirety of the nomadic way of life come under attack by ‘well intentioned’ outsiders who only want to increase production, regardless of the cost that must be assumed by the ecology.
Outside of the two books I mentioned earlier, I can’t recall having come across a more lyrical and poignant portrait of the costs of short-sighted ‘progress’ and Wolf Totem has them both beat in terms of readability. It’s also a good deal thicker, more damage to the shins of idiots, and perhaps even better, it comes at its themes much more obliquely, which can be of great use in subverting the minds of those idiots in question. I will admit that it is often better to lead people into their own conclusions without beating them across the brow, or the shins.
If there is a fault in the novel it would be that it does tend to get a touch didactic, but given the subject matter and the beautiful descriptions of the countryside and the ways that the lives of these nomadic herders are held together, it’s a very forgivable fault. Our narrator is in this village with several other students and as they are awakening to a new understanding of the world it is only natural that they would carry on repeated conversations delineating their new-found convictions. The author himself was actually in this very position during this time period, so his voice rings with authority about the subject matter, which also lessons the problematic nature of some of the ‘sermonizing’.
Anyone who is a fan of wolves should read this book, as it contains some fascinating theorizing about the way that wolves have shaped not only Mongolia, but indeed the entire course of human history. Anyone interested in putting some more poetic arrows into their quiver of weapons against the ludicrous practices of industrial agriculture should read this book. And anyone who is still convinced that humans are doing just fine in the ways they go about living their lives on this planet need to be forced to read this book, or maybe just whacked across the shins with it.