“[A] stirring allegorical critique of Chinese civilization.” –The New York Times
“[Jiang Rong], the former book burner, book thief, and book savior, is on the way to becoming one of the most celebrated and controversial Chinese novelists in the world.... Wolf Totem...has picked up almost a dozen major literary awards in China—and has now gained international recognition by winning the first Man Asian literary prize, created to highlight authors from the region who have yet to be published in English.” –The Guardian (UK)
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, ancient race of people who coexist in harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the groundstone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf.
The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes 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 reverece. After many years, the peace is shttered with the arrival of Chen's kinfolk, Han Chinese. They immediately launch a campaign to exterminate the wolves, sending the balance that has been maintained for thousands of years into a spiral leading to extinction--first of the wolves, then the Mongol culture, and finally the land.
Lu Jiamin, who wrote this novel under the pseudonym Jiang Rong, was born in Beijing in 1946. In 1967, he joined the first wave of intellectuals who moved to the countryside as volunteers, living with nomadic communities on the Chinese border of Inner and Outer Mongolia for eleven years. Following his return to Beijing, he embarked on postgraduate studies in economics and political science and assumed an academic position at a Beijing university. Now retired, he lives in Beijing with his wife. Wolf Totem is his first novel.
Howard Goldblatt is the foremost translator of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the West. He has published English translations of more than thirty novels and story collections by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He has also authored and edited half a dozen books on Chinese literature. He is a winner of the Translation of the Year Award given by the American Translators Association. He is currently a professor at the University of Notre Dame.
