Publishers Weekly
★ 09/20/2021
French anthropologist Martin makes her U.S. debut with this stunning reflection on her self-discovery in the wake of a bear attack she suffered in Siberia. During a 2015 research trip that took her from northern Alaska to the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, Martin was mauled by bear, an attack that shattered parts of her skull and left her to explore her body as a place of anthropological inquiry. Her recovery began in an operating room in Russia, but much of the reconstructive surgery was redone when she returned home in France, her jaw “the scene of a Franco-Russian medical cold war” (the doctor, Martin writes, said that “it would be risky to leave an ex-Soviet plate in my jaw”). Post-op, she began to contend with the “inexpressible violence” within herself that she’d also recognized in the bear, not that when “our bodies were commingled, there was that incomprehensible us.” After realizing that the only way to heal was to go back to Kamchatka, she returned to the place where her body and anthropological practice were transformed. With exquisite prose and sharp observations, Martin reveals how curiosity can uncover the most vivid aspects of the human condition. This is a profound look at the violence and beauty of life. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"I have work to do, but still I can’t put down Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild" —Jessa Crispin, The Spectator
“In the Eye of the Wild is Martin’s haunting, genre-defying memoir of the year that followed [her attack], though in Sophie R. Lewis’s elegant translation from the French, it becomes clear that ‘memoir’ is another word that doesn’t quite fit this slender yet expansive book. . . What Martin describes in this book isn’t so much a search for meaning as an acceptance of its undoing.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
“Martin’s narrative, with the bones of a personal essay and the lift of a prose poem . . . hunts for beauty in what remains occluded and apart. The result is heady and obsessive, as Martin smashes again and again against the limits of what anyone can know: What is a self? What is ‘the other’? . . . . Just how precious or sacred are you, really, if a bear can suddenly rip off part of your head?” —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
“Stunning. . . With exquisite prose and sharp observations, Martin reveals how curiosity can uncover the most vivid aspects of the human condition. This is a profound look at the violence and beauty of life.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[A] slim, stirring book. . . Despite the harrowing experience at its core, In the Eye of the Wild couldn’t be further from a conventional survival memoir. . . Martin sets out to transcend familiar modes in order to let the terrible strangeness of her experience speak.” —Nathan Goldman, The Baffler
“Martin returns obsessively to her violent encounter, struggling to make sense of it. In the Eye of the Wild is a thrilling story of survival, reminiscent of Artaud and Michaux, poised at the brink of the abyss.” —Le Monde des Livres
“A staggering book of metamorphoses, a hybrid of anthropology and literature, In the Eye of the Wild is both the record of an interior journey and an invitation to the reader to see the world in another way altogether.” —L’Humanité
“Beautifully gruesome. . . A fascinating, ambitious exploration of animism—the border between human and animal—and how she sees her encounter with the bear as a manifestation of a breakdown. . . The book represents both a collapse and a rebuilding. The language, in Sophie R Lewis’s elegant translation, is often seductive.” —John Self, The Guardian
“[In the Eye of the Wild is] composed in lucid, compressed prose. Straddling the visceral and the cerebral, the book is at once a riveting memoir of a life-altering encounter with a wild animal and a heady exploration of borders and liminality; the self as it interacts with, and absorbs some part of, the other; and the limits of anthropology as a method of understanding all of this. . . . Captivating and eminently readable.” —Megan Milks, 4Columns
“A gripping, thoughtful look at nature, and what happens when it turns hostile.” —InsideHook
