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The exams took place two weeks ago and I’m still trying to get back to normal. When I finally put on a pair of jeans and left my pajamas and text books at home to go to work, I noticed the world hadn’t stopped and waited for me; far from that!
However, and despite all the laws and codes I have been hanging out with for the last month, I also found time to read a little, and some of the books I’ve read have turned out to be some of my “future” favourites of the year, even though they are not new publications (we are talking about Rosamunde Pilcher or To kill a mockinbird, for example). I’ll try to review briefly some of them these days.
This book is actually a novella because it is quite short, but it stands out for its originality – the narrator is a wolf, and he places the reader in a cold winter, in the middle of a forest, with not so many chances to fill up your belly.
This wolf interacts with other animals in the forest – a prospective prey, another carnivorous competitor – and the way they communicate is beautifully explained in the book: the animals look one another in the eye, and they share their thoughts, the life they have been living before the encounter, and their will to survive. That said, a strong prey could tell the wolf without a word that she is not to surrender easily, and the wolf might answer showing her all the preys he has killed before and how hungry he is now. And the chase begins.
Remember: we are deep in the forest, and there happy endings don’t always take place.
The wolf
Joseph Smith
160 pages
UK: Jonathan Cape (Random House Mondadori)
My copy of the book (in Spanish). I love the illustration of this cover
The Wolf sounds interesting. (Huge congratulations for passing your exams!)
Thanks Lori! I was looking forward to writing again on my blog – I miss it too much when I can’t do it.
The book is different from other things I’ve read and I liked for that.