“There is an intoxication among the highest mountains, an intense joy peculiar to this detachment. And then, every time, comes the ordeal, following right behind it.” For Nastassja Martin, a French anthropologist living with and studying the indigenous Even people of remote Kamchatka, the ordeal is presaged by a thousand dreams; she has been bear-haunted always. “I was the one who walked like a wild thing along the spine of the world–and he is the one I found.” When the mist breaks, they are facing one another, six feet apart. Their bodies slam into each other. The bear walks away with part of her jaw in his mouth but bleeding too.
The aftermath is a stay in a grim ex-Soviet military hospital, isolated, disfigured, beyond the reach of visitors, lost in depths of pain; then French hospitals, with medical blunders and severe infections, her body “a territory where Western surgeons parley with Siberian bears.”
But In the Eye of the Wild, published last month, is not an adventure story, nor a survivalist narrative. It plumbs a different world, an animist world of dreams, symbolism and spirits, of an archaic transaction between a human and an animal “in whom the confrontation opens fault lines in their bodies and their minds . . . and mythical time meets reality; past time joins the present moment; dream meets flesh.” Like all survivors of bear attacks for the Even people, she is now medka, “half and half”: half human, half bear. The world she has returned to has nothing to offer her. Her face still swollen and criss-crossed with scars, she books a flight from Paris back to Kamchatka in deep winter to stay with her Even friends in the unthinkably remote forest below the mountains where the attack occurred. She is going to lair: 50 below outside, candles flickering, animal skins on the walls. They give her raw liver and a cup of hot reindeer blood for strength. She sinks “into the depths of oneiric time where nothing is settled, where the boundaries between living beings are still in flux and everything is still possible.”
This is a hauntingly beautiful book which weaves anthropology, memoir, poetic musing, and animist reflection into a gripping narrative. In taut language Martin records her flight from a world–our world–that feels to her empty and on the brink of collapse, into one where a savage encounter with another being launches her into a liminal space that offers up transformation, metamorphosis, meaning. Her return to Kamchatka and the indigenous elders brings no answers, but deepens the animist dimensions of her experience. In an ending that is also the beginning–the beginning that in turn yields this ending–she finishes with, “I start to write.”
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.
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