Rick Simonson

This Wolf is Bigger Than It Looks
April 1, 2008

Last Tuesday's PW Daily (March 25) gave watch-for-arrival mention of the phenomena that has been Chinese novelist Jian Rong's hugely bestselling, hugely acclaimed debut novel, Wolf Totem (Penguin Press). Translated by Howard Goldblatt (a busy translating man these days), it merits whatever attention it can get, in this reader's opinion. I will certainly be putting it in people's hands.

Wolf Totem is vividly, almost viscerally set in place - wolves, horses, sheep, mosquitoes, dogs, and grasses populate it as much as Mongol herdsmen, women, and  incoming Han Chinese animate it. And, as much as it renders palpable this remote country few readers in the US would know, at times it feels it could be set simultaneously in time up in Alaska, or some time past, in Montana or Wyoming high country. The conflicts and relationships it poses - 'between nomands and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture,' as Man Asian Literary Panel judge Adrienne Clarkson aptly notes - are ones that have been written about over here, as well.

The PW piece, and others, gave accounting of how this book was written (it is barely fiction, one senses), how drawn it is upon the author's experiences as a young Han Chinese man, who did study work in the Inner Mongolian grasslands back in the 1970s, and how he has largely eschewed personal publicity. He's given a few interviews, but hasn't been photographed. The PW article saying the author wouldn't be touring in the US therefore came off a bit gratuitously. Sorting of like saying, oh, by the way, Thomas Pynchon wouldn't be touring for his latest.

The funniest thing about the book came with its actual arrival. In reading books in some advance form - manuscript or galley - many of us imagine the likely heft and feel of the finished book. At over five hundred pages in a good-sized advance edition, it was easy to imagine something thick and weighty a real tome. Though the writing never flags, this is not a quick read (which was fine by me). There is also time and timelessness here.

Knowing it was somewhere in our incoming Penguin shipment, and in some noticeable quantity, I was puzzled as to its whereabouts. Where are you, Wolf? Then I saw the cover. Here it was ... looking as though it was all of 250 or so pages. No ... the book does have weight, does have its 500 pages, but this is the thin-page treatment. Put next to the galley, the galley is thicker, even without the hardcover.

All of that neither here nor there in the real reckoning of this book, a moving account of something immense, intimate, ancient, ritually new, beautiful, cruel, full of life, death, ineffable mystery, and its witness of the very disappearance of this all, right before our eyes,

Posted by Rick Simonson on April 1, 2008 | Comments (0)