In the Eye of the Wild

Nastassja Martin

Dec 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

5.0

1 review

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4 hr 4 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin's near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin's professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken-the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear. In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker's classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.

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About the author

Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich-in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. She has written Les Âmes sauvages: Face à l'Occident, la resistance d'un peuple d'Alaska, for which she received the Prix Louis Castex of the French Academy.

Actress and director Cassandra Campbell has narrated nearly two hundred audiobooks and has received multiple Audie Awards and more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman.

Sophie Lewis is an editor and a translator from French and Portuguese. Her translation of Noemi Lefebvre's Blue Self-Portrait was short-listed for both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018.

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