I've just finished Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, and my nose is still clogged up. The book is supposed to be bloodcurling, rugged, and hence masculine, but tears would just well up in my eyes every thirty pages or so.This book is ultra special. This is the first book I bought here in Cebu, and I bought it with the check PDI sent me for "Worth a million." But Totem occupies my current most-favorite list not because of those awful high school-y reasons, but because of the author's sheer masterful storytelling. It's a novel that reads more like an action-packed socio-politico-cultural documentary. I can only agree with San Francisco Chronicle, which describes it as "an intellectual adventure story . . . Five hundred bloody and instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl!"
Wolves now are the holiest creatures for me, even holier than human beings. Like the nomadic Mongols in China (or, at least when modernity has not yet destroyed their practices), I want a sky-burial when I die. I'd like my corpse to be taken to the woods, where wolves will eat my flesh and bring my soul to the grassland god, Tengger.
