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An epic Chinese tale in the vein of The Last Emperor, Wolf Totem depicts the dying culture of the Mongols — the ancestors of the Mongol hordes who at one time terrorized the world — and the parallel extinction of the animal they believe to be sacred: the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf.
Published under a pen name, Wolf Totem was a phenomenon in China, breaking all sales records there and earning the distinction of being the second most read book after Mao's little red book. There has been much international excitement too — to date, rights have been sold in thirteen countries.
Wolf Totem is set in 1960s China — the time of the Great Leap Forward, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Searching for spirituality, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols — a proud, brave, and ancient race of people who coexist in perfect harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the ground stone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf. The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes of the unforgiving grassland searching for food are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival — a life-and-death dance that has gone on between them for thousands of years. The Mongols believe that the wolf is a great and worthy foe that they are divinely instructed to contend with, but also to worship and to learn from. Chen's own encounters with the otherworldly wolves awake a latent primitive instinct in him, and his fascination with them blossoms into obsession, then reverence.
After many years, the peace is shattered with the arrival of Chen's kinfolk, Han Chinese, sent from the cities to bring modernity to the grasslands. They immediately launch a campaign to exterminate the wolves, sending the balance that has been maintained with religious dedication for thousands of years into a spiral leading to extinction — first the wolves, then the Mongol culture, finally the land. As a result of the eradication of the wolves, rats become a plague and wild sheep graze until the meadows turn to dust. Mongolian dust storms glide over Beijing, sometimes blocking out the moon.
Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem is a stinging social commentary on the dangers of China's over-accelerated economic growth as well as a fascinating immersion into the heart of Chinese culture.
Review:
"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
A Chinese publishing phenomenon has hit American bookshelves in the form of Jiang Rong's "Wolf Totem." This novel has sold more copies in China than any other book ever published, with the exception of Mao's "Little Red Book" and is the inaugural winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize. Many have wondered how "Wolf Totem" — which takes place in Inner Mongolia during the height of the Cultural Revolution... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and is highly critical of Chinese government and Chinese character — managed to avoid censorship. A greater wonder is its popularity. The book opens with the protagonist, a Chinese student named Chen Zhen, who has gone to re-educate himself with the Mongols, in the company of the wise Mongolian elder, Old Man Bilgee. They are hidden on a snow-blown ridge and watch as a pack of wolves stalk and kill a herd of gazelles. The scene is gripping, told with precision and flair. Subsequent scenes are no different and range from portraits of village life to communal hunts to what is probably the best scene in the book, which involves the massacre of a herd of horses. But none of these various episodes moves the book forward. "Wolf Totem" is supposed to be a novel of education: It begins with Chen Zhen's ignorance about wolves and Mongols, plods through scene after scene, until the novel arrives at the cataclysmic finale where, everything about life on the Steppes having been thrown off-balance by the destruction of the wolves, the Mongolian way of life has been destroyed as well. This is as much summary as is necessary in a novel that is little more than a frothy torrent of didacticism, jumping from one obvious insight to another on its way to the last page. Quite simply, the novel says: Education, when it comes, comes too late. The novel ends with an elegy for the wolf, the Mongol and Mongol worldview, all of which, Jiang Rong suggests, have been destroyed by the brutally blind policies of the Cultural Revolution. And while this conclusion is hard to argue with, "Wolf Totem" leaves the reader, this one anyway, annoyed and unsatisfied. Jiang Rong is the pseudonym of an author who claims to have spent 11 years in Mongolia between 1967 and 1978. "Wolf Totem" is the result of that time spent with Mongolians and wolves. I've seen and met wolves, both timber wolves and the more common brush wolf, in the wilds around my home in northern Minnesota. I've seen arctic wolves up close and personal in Nunavut, on the northwest coast of Hudson Bay. I have lived for a year with Ojibwe hunters who trap and shoot wolves to make their living. The kinds of wolf behavior and wolf qualities tabulated in "Wolf Totem" owe nothing to real wolves and owe more to easy allegory. And these allegorical beings end up tamping out all the excitement created by the book's fascinating subject and able description. And just when the scenes threaten to jump out of their pens and turn into an unruly and lively novel, the characters stop, turn and address one another in some of the most stilted dialogue in recent memory: "I'll bet not one in a hundred thousand Chinese has ever actually touched a living grassland wolf. We hate them, which means we hate whatever they're good at," muses a Chinese student deep in the novel. Chen Zhen responds: "In world history ... nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city's emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don't know wolves, you can't understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you'll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each." While one character among many could very well be a pedant, must they all sound like this? Pedantic or not, in the final analysis, "Wolf Totem" becomes more about race-baiting than wolf-baiting. Summaries of racial characteristics float from these characters' mouths with the greatest of ease (Chinese bad, Mongolian good). Perhaps "Wolf Totem" has been successful in China for precisely the same reason that James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales," not known for elegance or subtlety, were popular in the first half of the 19th century: It's safe and pleasing to look back on a landscape and a life that the nation-state has largely destroyed. One might even locate this cycle of destruction and romantic celebration as an early step in the literature of emerging capitalist nations. So while "Wolf Totem" seems to praise Mongolian life and the wild animals that inform that life, the wolf must die and be replaced with a novel that comes nowhere near the creature in terms of beauty and importance, and instead reads like a 500-page-long metaphor. Reviewed by David Treuer, whose novel 'The Translation of Dr. Apelles' was recently released in paperback, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"While Wolf Totem could be enjoyed as just a simple, beautifully told tale, you might also finish it with fresh, singular insight into the complexities and subtleties of a country and culture that most of us don't — but had better begin to — understand." Very Short List
Review:
"[A] naturalistic, gripping, and deeply affecting novel reminding us how badly we humans have managed our world. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review:
"Jiang's story is a careful, quiet one of cultures in collision, capably brought into unadorned English by translator Goldblatt." Kirkus Reviews
Jiang Rong was born in Jiangsu in 1946. His father's job saw the family move to Beijing in 1957, and Jiang entered the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1967. His education cut short by events in China, the twenty-one-year-old Jiang volunteered to work in Inner Mongolia's East Ujimqin Banner in 1967, where he lived and labored with the native nomads for the next eleven years of his life. He took with him two cases filled with Chinese translations of Western literary classics, and spent years immersed in personal studies of Mongolian history, culture, and tradition. A growing fascination for the mythologies surrounding the wolves of the grasslands inspired him to learn all he could about them and he adopted and raised an orphaned wolf cub. In 1978 he returned to Beijing, continuing his education at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences one year later. Jiang worked as an academic until his retirement in 2006. Wolf Totem is a fictional account of life in the 1970s that draws on Jiang's personal experience of the grasslands of China's border region.
Doug, January 5, 2011 (view all comments by Doug)
Spell-binding .. you will not want to put it down. From the 'Translator's Note' - "In 1969, a young Chinese intellectual from Beijing answered Chairman Mao's call for city dwellers to go 'up to the mountains and down to the countryside,' joining as many as a hundred like-minded youngsters in traveling to one of China'a most remote, most "primitive" spots north-central Mongolia. .... "Jiang Rong did in fact learn" ... and learn I did - WOW, to the very end of the book. If you have a love of the out-of-doors, and adventure, and Western literary classics - you will love this book. READ IT.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
The publisher of Wolf Totem says that this novel is an epic Chinese tale and that is true. My wife received an advanced copy requesting a blurb, and she didn’t have time to read the novel, so I did and it kept my attention. The main reason I kept reading was because I have had an interest in the Mongols since I was a child. Wolf Totem taught me a lot about this almost extinct culture. The one new thing I learned was the fascinating connection between wolves and Mongols and why this connection may have been the reason why Genghis Khan was so successful in his conquests. I recommend this novel to anyone that wants to learn more about the life of the Mongols and another aspect of the Cultural Revolution (Both Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie Fiction Anchor Trade Paperback and Red Azalea : Berkley Trade Signature Edition by Anchee Min show different aspects too). However, the philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is a bit overdone. I got the message the first time the characters talked about it but then the topic comes up over and over and over--a bit to much for my taste as I felt it got in the way of the story that was taking place between the main characters and the wolf pup they were attempting to raise. I won’t give away the ending but don’t expect it to be a happy one. Most Chinese novels don’t end with happy endings. The publisher also said that the novel was a stinging social commentary on the dangers of China's overaccelerated economic growth as well as a fascinating immersion into the heart of Chinese culture. That is also true of Wolf Totem.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (8 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by 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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review"
by Very Short List,
"While Wolf Totem could be enjoyed as just a simple, beautifully told tale, you might also finish it with fresh, singular insight into the complexities and subtleties of a country and culture that most of us don't — but had better begin to — understand."
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"[A] naturalistic, gripping, and deeply affecting novel reminding us how badly we humans have managed our world. Highly recommended."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"Jiang's story is a careful, quiet one of cultures in collision, capably brought into unadorned English by translator Goldblatt."
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