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128 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 2019
This little memoir is built on a gruesomely fascinating backstory. In 2015, a young Frenchwoman—an anthropologist, an expert on animism, with a published study of a small native Alaskan group already to her credit—is attacked and disfigured by a bear while doing fieldwork in Kamchatka, in Russia’s Far East. She survives by fighting back with an ice axe. She describes feeling the bear’s teeth crushing her jaw, her heightened senses and lucidity immediately afterwards, her hearing far in the distance the Soviet-era helicopter coming to medevac her to the nearest hospital. She endures multiple surgeries in Russia and France to rebuild her face, but before she is completely healed she leaves France and returns to Kamchatka to confront the meaning of the attack and explore how it has changed her both physically and psychically. That is, still wounded and recuperating, Martin flees the love and comfort of her mother’s house in the Alps to return to an indigenous village in a Siberian forest, to live among people who still live among wild animals. She spends a winter with an Even family, about as far as possible from modern civilization, in a yurt, sleeping on the ground, hibernating, bear-like, and dreaming of encounters with predators. She believes sometimes that she is going mad. The Even have a word for people like her: medka, someone marked by the bear, living a liminal existence between human and animal worlds. The coincidence—or resonance, her preferred term—between her professional interest and the now-central event of her life is rich with possibility.
This premise was more than enough to get me to buy and read In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin. But an interesting premise, or situation, alas, does not guarantee a successful book, and Martin’s memoir is deeply disappointing and frustrating, more histrionic than analytical or reflective. It contains a number of wonderful descriptive passages but ultimately communicates much less than it wants to. In the Eye of the Wild reveals very little about the nature of animals, or of human interactions with animals, or of indigenous cultures, or even of the fragility of those cultures, but it does reveal a lot about Martin’s personality, and it’s not an entirely pretty picture. She sounds, frankly, juvenile. She is too much and too consciously the heroine of her own story, irascible, opinionated, intolerant, and self-mythologizing, quick to tell us what disgusts her, what and who annoy her. She’s beyond prickly: she’s combative. Even before the attack, her indigenous friends refer to her as matukha, or “she-bear.” The following passage is unusually straightforward:
If the bear is a reflection of myself, which symbolic expression of this idea am I now exploring most assiduously? Were it not for his yellow gaze answering my blue one, I might perhaps have been contented with these correspondences. Although I would prefer to use the term resonance. But our bodies were commingled, there was that incomprehensible us, that us which I confusedly sense comes from a very distant place, from a before situated far outside of our limited existences. I turn these ideas over in my head. Why did we choose each other? What truly do I share with this wild creature, and since when? The truth as I see it is that I've never sought to bring peace to my life, far less to my encounters with others. On this point my therapist is correct: I am not at peace. I don't even know what the word means. I've been working for years in a Far North rocked by profound transformations. I know how to work with metamorphoses, explosions, kairos, crises. I find things to say, for times of crisis always seem valuable to think through—because they hold the possibility of another life, a new world. On the other hand, I have never known what to do with peacefulness or stability; serenity is not my strong suit. I consider that out there on the high plains, I must subconsciously have been seeking the one who would at last reveal the warrior in me, that this must surely be why I didn't run away when he blocked my path. On the contrary: I plunged into battle like a Fury, and we branded each other's bodies with the sign of the other. I struggle to explain it, but I know that this encounter was planned. 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.
I wish more of the prose in this book were as clear as this. Close to the end, Martin provides a thrillingly precise narrative description of her fight with the bear and follows with as close to an interpretive summation as she gets, comparing her event with the ancient cave paintings at Lascaux. Her attack was and is archetypal, in which “mythical time meets reality” and “dream meets flesh,” an encounter repeated thousands of times across the world in both history and pre-history, in which “the frontiers between two worlds implode”:
This is not a thought I want to articulate aloud; I prefer to write it. Today, sitting on the riverbank in wet snow, I write that there is an implicit, unspoken law specific to the predators seeking and evading each other in the depths of the forests and upon the mountain ranges of this earth. The law is as follows: when they meet, if they meet, their territories collide, their worlds turn upside down, their usual paths are altered, and their connection becomes everlasting. There is a kind of suspension of movement, a holding back, a hiatus, a dazzlement that grips the two wild creatures caught in this ancient encounter—the meeting that cannot be prepared, nor avoided, nor escaped.
This is good, but there’s not enough of it. What is also good is Martin’s mordant, satirical descriptions of the various Russian and French hospitals where she was treated. Naked, restrained, and intubated, Martin listens in the middle of the night to the grunts and moans of the Siberian head doctor and nurse having sex in the next room. In France her doctors conduct on her jaw a kind of medical Cold War, insisting on redoing the presumably inept and primitive facial reconstruction begun in Russia. I wish Martin had devoted more ink to describing the indigenous people who hosted her in their cabins, who made a home for her on their floor mats and animal skins, who made tea for her and offered her interpretations for her dreams. Perhaps I’m being churlish in complaining about narcissism in someone who has undergone and is trying to assimilate a horrible personal experience; maybe I was just expecting more anthropology and less a personal cris de coeur. Nevertheless, I found much of the language in In the Eye of the Wild performative and pseudo-poetic.
In the Eye of the Wild is an attempt to express the ineffable. It’s a familiar ambition among writers with a Romantic bent: Moby Dick comes to mind. But effectively conveying something deep and original, something that defies description, takes enormous talent to pull off, or even partially to pull off. It requires a respect for one’s audience, an awareness of the difficulty of language. More often than not, writers attempting to express something mystical resort to strings of superlatives, to hyperbole, to nonsense, to sound and fury. Nastassja Martin’s memoir could have been a wonderful book, but it reads like a first draft.