Book of the Month: Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong

Life on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia is hard and brutal, but it embodies an edifying nobility and symmetry too. That's one of the central themes of the electrifying Chinese novel Wolf Totem, written by a publicity-shy, 61-year-old former political science professor at a Beijing university, under the pseudonym Jiang Rong.

Like Jiang, the protagonist of Wolf Totem, Chen Zhen, is an "educated youth" who has moved to the grasslands from the city in the mid-1960s, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. There he quickly becomes fascinated with the wolf, at once the adversary and the totem of the local Mongolian people. The wolf is fierce, ruthless, cunning, and essential to the delicate balance of the grasslands ecosystem—and becomes a key for Chen to unlock the intricate riches of grasslands life. During the course of the novel, more and more Han Chinese move into the region, bringing their naive ideas about land use and animal control. As a result, the wolves are exterminated, which contributes to the grasslands beginning to turn into desert.

That's a sweeping overview of this long and dense book, but the novel's prime power and beauty are in its closely observed details, particularly its extraordinary depictions of wolves and their relationship with men. The power of Jiang's prose (and of Howard Goldblatt's excellent translation) is evident early in the book when he describes a nighttime, mid-blizzard raid by wolves on a herd of prized horses, and the desperate efforts of the horses' guardian to save the herd. The energy of that description—the wolves flinging themselves on the horses, fangs bared, the horses' blind terror—had me flying through pages, hairs standing on the back of my neck.

This semi-autobiographical novel is a literary triumph, but even more impressively, it is a triumph of cross-cultural connection and understanding, written by a son of one tribe that too often seems intent on subjugating the other.