In the Eye of the Wild by Natassja Martin

On that day, August 25, 2015, the event is not: a bear attacks a French anthropologist somewhere in the mountains of Kamchatka. The event is: a bear and a woman meet and the frontiers between two worlds implode. Not just the physical boundaries between the human and the animal in whom the confrontation open fault lines in their bodies and their minds. This is also when mythical time meets reality; past time joins the present moment; dream meets flesh. The scene unfolds in our time, but it could equally have happened a thousand years ago. It is just me and the bear in this contemporary world that's indifferent to our personal trajectories--but this is also the archetypal confrontation, the unsteady man with his erect sex standing face-to-face with the wounded bison in the Lascaux well. And as in the Lascaux well scene, the incredible event depicted is dominated by uncertainty about its outcome, although it is inevitable. But unlike the well scene, what happens to us next is no mystery, for neither of us dies, for we both return from the impossibility that has happened.

In 2015, French anthropologist Natassja Martin was attacked by a bear in the wilds of the Kamchatka peninsula. The bear attacked Martin's face and leg, taking a piece of her jawbone away in his own jaws. Martin's recovery, as recounted in her memoir In the Eye of the Wild, was long, requiring several surgeries, first at a remote Russian army hospital and then back in Paris. But only a fraction of the attack's effects were physical: deeper and more lasting is the transformation within. Ultimately, Martin must return to Kamchatka to--what? Heal? Recover? None of these words quite fit what it is that drives her back to the wild. She returns to Kamchatka to find and face not just the bear, but herself, though these may be the same thing .

To her friends among the Indigenous Evens, Martin has become a medka, someone who is half-person, half-bear. Some avoid her and even her things, because of a belief that, once a person has survived the attack, the bear with which they are entwined will never cease pursuing them, and thus bring danger and ruin to the whole community. And indeed, the experience, in Martin's account, has an air of inevitability to it. Even before the attack, Martin dreamed of bears, and describes the meeting with the bear on the mountain as going out to meet her dream. After the attack, Martin describes the experience as one that has transformed both her and the bear. As the bear walked away with her jaw, so a piece of the bear has been symbolically lodged inside her. The attack is that rare event, a moment when the boundaries between animal and human have broken down. In a way, the attack epitomizes what Martin is looking for among the Evens, who she describes as living closer to land, to danger, and to risk, a refuge from the false protection and promise of the urban world.

I've never read a book quite like In the Eye of the Wild. If it were only a memoir of the experience of a bear attack, it would be worth reading for that alone--though Martin spends little if any time recounting the attack itself. But Martin's mixture of academic anthropological language and the mystical style of her "animist" philosophy are what really sets the book apart as a book. In these Martin finds a language appropriate to what has happened to her, fitting the strangeness and the inscrutability of the wild bear. It is hard, actually, not to walk away thinking that Martin is correct: that the bear is her dream, and that it would have always found her, because no one else could have told the story of the dream the way she has./