Wolf Totem
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'In war,' the old man said, 'wolves are smarter than men. We Mongols learned from them how to hunt, how to encircle, even how to fight a war. There are no wold packs where you Chinese live, so you haven't learned to fight a war. You can't win a war just because you have lots of land and people. No, it depends on whether you're a wolf or a sheep.'
It is the 1960s, and Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen volunteers to live in a remote nomadic settlement on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. There, he discovers an age-old synergy between the nomads, their livestock, and the wild wolves who roam the plains. Chen learns about the rich spiritual relationship that exists between these adversaries, and what each might learn from the other.
But when members of the People's Republic swarm in from the cities to bring modernity and productivity to the grasslands, the peace of Chen's solitary existence is shattered, and the delicate balance between humans and wolves is disrupted. Only time will tell whether the grasslands' environment and culture will ever recover...
A beautiful and moving portrayal of a land and culture that no longer exists, Wolf Totem is also a powerful portrait of modern China and a fascinating insight into the country's view of itself, its history and its people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A publishing sensation in China, this novel wraps an ecological warning and political indictment around the story of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student sent during the 1960s Cultural Revolution to live as a shepherd among the herdsmen of the Olonbulang, a grassland on the Inner Mongolia steppes. Chen Zhen is fascinated by the herdsmen, descendants of Genghis Khan, and by the grassland's wolves, with whom the herdsmen live in uneasy harmony. When Mao's government orders the mass execution of the wolves to make way for farming collectives run by Chen Zhen's own people, the Han Chinese, he makes for a somewhat passive hero. Except for Bilgee, the wise old herdsman, and Director Bao, the face of the Communist government in the Olonbulang, the novel's secondary characters make little impression. The wolf packs, however, are vividly and beautifully described. As Chen Zhen helplessly witnesses the consequences of the order, he risks the enmity of both the herdsmen and the state officials by capturing a wolf cub and lovingly raising it as his own wolf totem. Jiang Rong writes reverently about life on the steppes in a manner that recalls Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf.
