.xwaldie reviews a new memoir by the anthropologist Natassja Martin, which recalls the trauma of an extreme event: a bear mauling.
As far as radical interventions go, getting mauled by a bear is about as extreme as it gets. Few events are so undeniable, so borderline cheesy; the metaphors, embarrassed by a lack of subtlety, keep their distance. For the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin, this difficulty in meaning-making heaps insult on injury.
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”? She considers her scars, her jaw now fitted with metal. “The figure,” Martin writes, meaning her body, “is reconstituted following its own unique pattern, but out of elements that are completely exogenous.” As a narrator, Martin can be humorless , and is often frustrated, angry, lost.
Metaphors of art or Eros might seduce Martin, but political analogies leave her cold. Yet she has written a strenuously geopolitical book. The story crisscrosses Paris, the Hautes-Alpes, the Yukon Flats, and the Kamchatka region; in the background, native Even villagers chafe against the Russian state. The French physicians who take up Martin’s case disparage the work of her Siberian doctors.
I bring up Daria in part to clear some of the book’s weaknesses out of the way. The most venial of these sins relates to storytelling: Martin is thrilling when she tests ideas, but she’s less adept at action, at animating a scene, and she can bury a memory’s importance in unnecessary detail. More oppressive are the book’s bursts of self-importance, although it feels churlish to pick on what they likely reflect—a need to rationalize trauma, to ignite it with meaning.
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