Instead, Martin sets out to transcend familiar modes in order to let the terrible strangeness of her experience speak. Less intrepid and life-affirming than frank and brooding, it neither revels in the sensational violence of the bear attack nor offers a palatable narrative of recovery and redemption. A bite from the bear leaves her badly injured, and the memoir follows her difficult rehabilitation as she moves from one hospital to another, and then back to Kamchatka, while she struggles to understand what has happened to her against the backdrop of medical bureaucracy, the concern and misapprehensions of friends and strangers alike, and ceaseless, overwhelming pain.įor Martin, violence opens up a space of unspeakable closeness.ĭespite the harrowing experience at its core, In the Eye of the Wild couldn’t be further from a conventional survival memoir. Lewis-begins in the autumn of 2015, hours after Martin survives an encounter with a bear on the Kamchatka Peninsula, where she has been living with the indigenous Even people. This slim, stirring book-released in French in 2019, and out now in English, in an elegant translation by Sophie R. If in Engel’s novel the delivery of a wound severs the outlandish relationship between woman and bear, in anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s memoir In the Eye of the Wild, it does precisely the opposite: an incident of interspecies violence forges an ineffable bond.

The next day, it dawns on her that something has shifted between them: “The high, whistling communion that had bound them during the summer” is gone. Shocked, Lou banishes him from the house. Tear off my head, my bear.” No luck-he merely places “a soft paw on her naked shoulder, only lovingly.” But during their final rendezvous, without invitation or warning, his claws slice her back, drawing blood. Tear my thin skin with your clattering claws. A few trysts later, she tries him again, going further: “I am only a human woman. “Pull my head off.” The bear-a gentler creature than either of the human lovers of Lou’s we meet-demurs.

Not long after Lou, the mild-mannered archivist at the center of Marian Engel’s brilliant 1976 novel Bear, starts having sex with an ursine companion, she announces her affection as a plea for violence. In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated by Sophie R.

Bear by marian engel pages