Wolf Totem
SynopsisPlot
Part period epic, part fable for modern days, 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. Beautifully translated by Howard Goldblatt, the foremost translator of Chinese fiction, this extraordinary novel is finally available in English.
Story
About this book
Wolf Totem follows Chen Zhen, a young Chinese student who volunteers to live among nomadic herders in a remote settlement near the border of Inner and Outer Mongolia. There he encounters a way of life shaped by harsh grassland and by the wolves that roam it. The herders treat the Mongolian wolf as sacred, and survival depends on a tense balance between people and wolf packs. Chen becomes absorbed in studying how the packs hunt and organize.
The story unfolds during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when campaigns pushed to convert pastoral grassland into farmland and to kill wolves as pests. Those policies threaten the herding culture and the ecosystem that sustains it. Jiang Rong uses Chen's attachment to the wolves to raise questions about ecological limits, rapid modernization, and what disappears when outside authority reshapes a landscape.
First published in China in 2004, Wolf Totem sold millions of copies there. Howard Goldblatt, a translator long associated with Chinese-language fiction, produced the English version. The book moves between period narrative and fable, and its structure keeps the wolves and the grassland at the centre rather than in the background.
