The Old Man and the Wolves - by Julia Kristeva (Paperback)

About the Book

Part detective story, part fable, this novel--narrated by a French journalist--takes the reader to a mythical postindustrial city where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarianism have been erased.

Book Synopsis

Wolves have invaded the seaside resort town of Santa Varvara, a fictional postindustrial city in Eastern Europe, killing thousands of people, but no one will speak of it except a Latin professor known as the Old Man. Part detective story, part fable, this novel is set in a mythical landscape where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarianism have been erased. Narrated by a French journalist--Stephanie Delacour, Julia Kristeva's alter ego--The Old Man and the Wolves shows the great thinker at the height of her literary powers.

Review Quotes

In Kristeva's version of the allegorical psychological thriller, the dream of a civilized and civilizing logic becomes transformed into the discontents' chilling prayer to the wolves themselves.-- "Review of Contemporary Fiction"

Kristeva's experimental novel is an iridescent gem glinting with psychoanalytic speculations, shards of myth and classical lore, and musings on death, hate, love and the imagination.-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 "for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature."

Barbara Bray (1924-2010) was a leading translator of twentieth-century French literature into English, including works by Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, and Alain Robbe-Grillet.