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. Along with In the Eye of the Wild, she has
written Les mes sauvages- Face l'Occident, la resistance d'un
peuple d'Alaska, for which she received the Prix Louis Castex of
the French Academy.
Sophie Lewis is an editor and a translator from French and
Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Jules Verne,
Marcel Ayme, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, and Jo o Gilberto
Noll, among others. 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. She lives in
London.
"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
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