Wolf Totem: A Novel - Softcover

Rong, Jiang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143115146 ISBN 13: 9780143115144

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2009

Synopsis

China's runaway bestseller and winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize

Published in China in 2004, Wolf Totem has broken all sales records, selling millions of copies (along with millions more on the black market). 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Jiang Rong was born in Jiangsu in 1946. His father’s job saw the family move to Beijing in 1957, and Jiang entered the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1967. His education cut short by events in China, the twenty-one-year-old Jiang volunteered to work in Inner Mongolia’s East Ujimqin Banner in 1967, where he lived and labored with the native nomads for the next eleven years of his life. He took with him two cases filled with Chinese translations of Western literary classics, and spent years immersed in personal studies of Mongolian history, culture, and tradition. A growing fascination for the mythologies surrounding the wolves of the grasslands inspired him to learn all he could about them and he adopted and raised an orphaned wolf cub. In 1978 he returned to Beijing, continuing his education at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences one year later. Jiang worked as an academic until his retirement in 2006. Wolf Totem is a fictional account of life in the 1970s that draws on Jiang’s personal experience of the grasslands of China’s border region.

From AudioFile:

In this autobiographical novel set in the 1960s, the author leaves his life as an intellectual in Bejing and goes to the remote grasslands of Mongolia. There he becomes enthralled with the nomadic life and the synergies between the mongols and their environment, particularly the wolves with whom they share the grasslands. The long passages of exposition and description are handled adroitly by Jason Culp. Maintaining a strong, steady pace, he adopts the air of an interested observer who is at times surprised by what he sees and hears. He uses accents to draw out the contrast between the speech patterns and tonality of the Mongols, the students among them, and the Chinese who later come to drive the people into the modern world. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0143115146
• ISBN 13: 9780143115144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 526