The Last Hunt

Chronicles the life and death meeting of one man, a professional banker hunting as an avocation, and one bear, outside its territory and trying to get home

In his first work to be published in English, noted German novelist and naturalist Stern addresses pressing political issues and timeless human concerns within the framework of a slight, wistful tale about two aging hunters, a man and a bear. The settings are Germany and an unnamed Eastern European country in the 1970s. The man, referred to as Joop, oversees the foreign operations of a large German bank; he is middle-aged, divorced, unsociable and an enthusiastic hunter. The bear is large--of record size--and he too is a loner past his prime. As the bear returns to the woods he left long ago and as Joop revisits the sites of his failed marriage, Stern traces their paths to their fateful meeting. His spare, direct prose imbues the story with the resonance of myth. Oblique comments on global ecology, the evolution of capitalism and democracy, mortality, destiny, human and animal instinct and ambivalence enrich this elemental, deeply affecting drama.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A modern-day hunting fable--and US debut for German novelist and journalist Stern--details the degrees of engagement leading to a final confrontation between a long-suffering giant bear and a master of the universe who's busily arranging post-Soviet jump- starts in Eastern Europe economies for the World Bank. As the first step in an inexorable convergence of destinies, the bear reenters the territory from which it had been driven years before, urged on by a desire to revisit its place of origin. Unlike others of its kind that have become accustomed to receiving food from keepers, and that have thereby been set up as easy kills in government-regulated ``hunts,'' the bear, wary of human contact, is deemed an unacceptable threat to the well-ordered system of big- game management. In Germany, meanwhile, the powerful banker Joop is lonely and restless at the top of his profession, and daydreams increasingly about hunting and a former wife--his last real contacts with the pleasure of life; when word comes from a former guide that he could add a bear to his list of trophies, he makes the most of the opportunity. As the guide succeeds in taming the beast, Joop arrives in the country with an economic stimulus package in hand, but he finds himself more repulsed than exhilarated by the prospect of the hunt, as latent environmental sympathies come to the fore and he identifies with his prey. In the end, he does his masculine duty, but the experience leaves him a changed man. A well-crafted allegory exposing the grimness of real-world economics--as well as a vivid tale, with life in the animal kingdom having far more vitality than the dull, narrow realm of human experience. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Stern pits a solitary bear against a solitary German banker. Of course, the bear has no choice in its fate--it is dumbly lured to a shooting blind and felled by two shots. But the banker is in some ways like the bear: His instincts are conditioned by options that result in his pulling the trigger. Investments take him to an eastern European country (seemingly, Tito's Yugoslavia); the dictator puts a game preserve and its prize bear at his disposal. But doubts beset the banker. At various stages, in addition to scorning everyone he meets, he reviles himself as a fool; he cringes at memories of his wife, who was a better shot. He's a lonesome vacuity at odds with his high position. Such perplexities never enter the carnivore's mind, of course--but it does have a mind, earthily rendered by Stern. A grubbing, foraging creature, the bear reciprocates precisely the banker's solitariness, his fear of humans. Interpreted this way, Stern's parallel stories suggest a deep psychological meaning beneath the superficial industry-rapes-environment motif. Stern is already popular in his native Germany and should snare the attention of America's coffeehouse habitu{‚}es. Gilbert Taylor

A passionate German hunter who is also an exceptionally influential member of the international banking community is manipulated both by circumstance and by his own past into becoming the killer of an old bear, mangy and disoriented, but still a true king of beasts, in Communist Eastern Europe. Stern, who was formerly the host of a popular nature program on German television, is able to turn the bear into the novel's second protagonist by vividly and convincingly describing its perceptions as it makes its way through the landscape. The result is a lyrical, moving, and elegiac meditation on the change and corruption that has been brought about by the confrontation between animal and human, East and West, Europe and America, business and environmentalism, the past and the present. Highly recommended for general collections.
- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.