Review: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

Linda is not like the other girls her age, much to her mother’s distress. She’s more feral; strangely connected to the forest that surrounds their cabin, as though it were a quiet extension of herself. Despite labels like ‘freak’ sticking to her, Linda lives a relatively uneventful life, all the while acknowledging that because her world started off in a commune, there is something different about her.

It is only when Paul arrives that she truly feels at home; a part of a family. Four-year-old Paul and his young but eccentric mother, Patra, take up residence in the cabin across the lake from Linda, and the young girl becomes Paul’s babysitter. Her life settles into a new comfortable pattern, which is disrupted by the return of Paul’s father, and a seemingly innocuous illness that settles upon the young boy.

While Linda tries to make sense of her newly adjusted role within their family, there are things left unsaid; quiet secrets and rumours that hand like dried leaves in the air around her, daring to be examined. Nevertheless, Linda chooses to forge her own path, ignorant of the consequences.

History of Wolves is both frighteningly realistic and utterly surreal; a stream-of-consciousness walk through a life untainted by experience or understanding. Linda is in a world isolated from humanity, and yet she is thrust into situations which require her input, or are fed by it. As things slowly fall apart, she attempts to examine herself through her own lens of otherness, with macabre findings.

Fridlund has gifted the reader a truly remarkable experience, simultaneously jarring and yet comfortable; a fairy tale retold in the shadows of a thriller. The prose is beautiful and the rhythm erratic and delicious. Questioning faith and science, as well as one’s place in the universe, History with Wolves is as moving as it is addictive, and I highly recommend it.

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of Orion Publishing, and is available in South Africa from Jonathan Ball Publishers.