Take a photo of a barcode or cover
arymonster 's review for:
Wolf Totem
by Jiang Rong
I don’t know if something was lost in translation, but I didn’t enjoy Wolf Totem nearly as much as I had anticipated. In part, I suspect that something was lost in translation. The prose was functional, but not much more than that. I suspect much of the lyricism that made it a major success in China simply couldn’t be expressed in English.
The dialog also felt wooden, didactic and expository instead of naturalistic. Then again, maybe that’s just the way Maoist revolutionaries talk. But the extended reflections on wolf hunting strategy, or grassland ecology, felt out of place as dialog (not that I didn’t appreciate the insights; just that it was not believable as two people talking to each other).
But with my biggest problem was with the characters themselves. Other than Chen Zhen, the author’s proxy, and his best friend, none of the characters had any real interiority. We experience what they say to the author, but we get no sense of their motivations or their history. All the other characters, even the revered Bilgee, have no past, no background. That kept me from really feeling transported by the story.
The dialog also felt wooden, didactic and expository instead of naturalistic. Then again, maybe that’s just the way Maoist revolutionaries talk. But the extended reflections on wolf hunting strategy, or grassland ecology, felt out of place as dialog (not that I didn’t appreciate the insights; just that it was not believable as two people talking to each other).
But with my biggest problem was with the characters themselves. Other than Chen Zhen, the author’s proxy, and his best friend, none of the characters had any real interiority. We experience what they say to the author, but we get no sense of their motivations or their history. All the other characters, even the revered Bilgee, have no past, no background. That kept me from really feeling transported by the story.