The WLS Evening Book Club is a very simple affair, open to all. Here’s how to join: 

• Sign up for our newsletter. 

• Borrow one of our library copies free of charge. 

• Hop online from 7-8 p.m. each First Wednesday for some great conversation! 

 

New to book clubs? Come join us! There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of talking about something you just read with some nice folks who’ve read it, too. 

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We hold our meetings on Zoom, so you can join us right from your favourite reading chair. New to Zoom? It’s easy—we’ll help you connect.
 

Library copies are first come, first served (you can also buy your own at one from our friends at the Wairarapa’s many great local bookstores.) 

Any questions, contact library@wls.org.nz.Readers of the Wairarapa, you are never alone! 

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Wednesday 5 April: In the Eye of the Wild

 

In April we’ll be discussing In the Eye of the Wild, Natassja Martin’s memoir of her life-changing encounter with a bear in the remote Kamchatka Mountains. Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich-in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Along with In the Eye of the Wild (Croire aux fauves in France) she has written Les Âmes sauvages: Face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska, for which she received the Prix Louis Castex from the Académie Française.

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The Blurb: In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies.

 

Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with.
 

Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear.
 

In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being. —from New York Review Books

Some links!

• Reviews seem to agree that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill account of how human spirit triumphs against nature, and more about exploring the liminal space where human and animal meet. What do you think?
   

• Check out To Believe in the Animal from Villa Albertine. It includes interviews with Nastassja Martin, novelist David Vann, and translator Sophie Lewis.