Author: Julia Kristeva Year: 1991 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Fantasy Cultures: France, Bulgaria
Purchase/reserch links:
ISBNs: 9780231080200 0231080204 |
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From the publisher (source: The Internet Book List): Santa Varvara is an Eastern European seaside resort frequented by German and Russian tourists and inhabited by professors, students, and doctors who take quiet stands on religious and political freedom.
When mysterious wolves from the steppes invade Santa Varvara and people begin to disappear, this town of passive decadence transmogrifies into a dreamscape in which "men [become] wolves toward men." Only an old man, a professor of Latin, believes in the ominous reality and magnitude of the descending wolves, yet his fears are dismissed.
The power of this jarring narrative is expressed in the fierce conflict between the learned old man's perception of the wolves and the community's refusal to consider them responsible for the deaths of several people, despite mounting evidence to the contraty.
A French journalist and former student of the Latin professor, Stephanie Delacour, investigates the phantom wolves. When the old man dies under unexplained circumstances, Stephanie's crime reporting metamorphoses into a personal journey that focuses her sleuthing skills on her feelings about both this father figure and her own deceased father.
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