Leaving the therapy center, I raise an exhausted face to the white sun. Did I need that? Once again I will have to look deeply into myself. I think of the bear. If he’s alive, at least he is living his bear life free from attacks like this, symbolic and actual, without paying this price. [loc. 600]
In 2015 Nastassja Martin, a French anthropologist who was studying the indigenous Evens in Siberia, was attacked by a bear. She spent a long time in hospital in Petropavlovsk: later, she was repatriated to Paris, where French surgeons redid the work of the Russian doctors (introducing a life-threatening infection) and French therapists urged her to confront her hostility and inner darkness. Her response: 'Why must I bring everything back to myself?' She returned to Siberia, to her Even friends, finding their animist philosophy more acceptable and more compelling than the 'Western' narrative of sacrifice, symbolism, and interpretation. Which is not to say that the Evens were universally accepting: they believed the bear meant to mark her, not kill her, and that surviving the attack had made her medka, someone who lives between the worlds.
Poetic and philosophical, yet also rather unsettling. I felt that despite her comfortable familiarity with the Evens, and her sense of alienation whilst in France with her mother and sister, she was trying to have the best of both worlds: she mythologises the encounter with the bear ('I had marked out the path that would lead me into the bear’s mouth, to his kiss, long ago. I think: who knows, perhaps he had too'), and her honest, raw account of the healing process often feels dismissive of those around her. The nature of her relationships with the Evens is not really clear, either, because the focus is so firmly on her own interior life. There's very little about their culture, their beliefs, or what they think about having a French anthropologist embedded in their village. (And yet, and yet: one of them, having a premonition that Nastassja was in trouble, travelled a hundred kilometres to a place where he could get a mobile signal -- and learned of her encounter via a text message she persuaded someone to send for her.) I'd have liked more about Kamchatka: the wilderness, the people, the culture, the uneasy balance between the Evens and the 'Russians'. But that is not the book that Martin needed to write. In the Eye of the Wild is about alienation: about living between two worlds, not quite part of either, and there is some powerful writing here, with a distinctive voice.
Fulfils the ‘in translation’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.
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