Ordinary Wolves. Seth Kantner.
Milkweed Editions. 2004
Reviewed by Cris Wilson
Although this book is a novel, it struck me as one of the most vividly accurate books about life in bush Alaska yet written. Forget Krakauer and even McPhee. The book's narrator is a young white boy named Cutuk, who lives with his father and his brother and sister outside a native village accessible only by mail plane. I once was a teacher in a similar village where I flew out to work with white families living a subsistance lifestyle. I know the toll it takes on the kids who can't claim membership in either world. That was the life of Seth Kantner who was raised 200 miles from the nearest village. He expresses the wonder and the heartbreak of growing up and trying to find a way as an adult when the only place he truely feels right is in camp by the river. Who are the wolves? Are they on the tundra or in Anchorage? A truely extraordinary story.
1 comment:
Ordinary Wolves is absolutely one of the most engaging novels I have ever read. It begins in the voice of a young boy whose immanent relationship with his world brings us within his sod igloo and its immediate landscape, located just north of the Arctic Circle. As his life evolves over two decades, he maintains that same level of insight and relationship with both the natural world, and the world of the people of his family and those he encounters during his expeditions to various levels of the inhabited world of Alaska. Though the canine and the human wolves are depicted with a precision that allows us to relate to them as 'ordinary,' there is nothing ordinary about this novel.
Post a Comment