A poignant and triumphant tale of a great creature in the wild. He feels the bitterness and savagery of men and his pack, there has been a dividing line in his relations with humans by no fault but their own due to their constant usage of this canine Buck in work, in pulling in the snow, they have not shown any kindness, but there is hope he will soon be blessed with some.One man shows a kindness that helps Buck, who has had a life of toil and enduring of hardships, its a warming to the heart to see man and animal bonded in humility and kindness.Humans can be cruel and unkind to each other, and many guilty of worser crimes to animals in the wild and those under their control as a pet, they are more vulnerable and have no voice.Jack London here has given them a voice in this story and White Fang.He has successfully placed us in their point of view, in the shoes of the main protagonist Buck. An inspiring story that will continue to last through time.Jack London is another author that I recently hold high up there in the sphere of great writers, he writes with great insight into the world, the behaviours, the human condition and here the animal dilemma.I read this story way too late in my life, I only wished that I learned of these great stories of his when i was in my youth. This story has revived for me the importance of justice and kindness to the animal kingdom and the freedom to an animal of the wild.Joe Lansdale an author, I have praised many times due to his similar storytelling of great human stories and wonderful character creations, recommends this author and has said in an interview that Jack London had inspired him in his youth as a writer and I can now see why.If all this is not enough reason to read this or to remind one of its greatness, then read what the author E. L. Doctorow said in his preface of this story..."Man and dog are here together put back into prehistory, one of the moments of metaphorical abutment in which the book abounds. The law of the club and the law of the fang are one and the same, which is to say that in this primeval life of nature man and dog are morally indistinguishable-the call of the wild calls us all. We are dealing in this instance with not a literal dog but a mythopoetic thesis.It is perhaps his fatherless life of bitter self-reliance in late-nineteenth-century America that he transmutes here-though this is not the way it does us any good to read it. It seems more relevantly his mordant parable of the thinness of civilisation, the brutality ready to spring up through our institutions, the failure of the human race to evolve truly from its primeval beginnings. It derives from Jack London's Marxism the idea of the material control of our natures, and from his Darwinism the convictions that life triumphant belongs to the most fit. This is not a sweet idea for a book, it is rather the kind of concept to justify tyrannies and the need of repressive social institutions to keep people from tearing themselves to bits. But London's Nietzchean superdog has our admiration, if the truth be told. For as grim as its implications are, the tale never forgets its sources as a magazine frontier romance. It leaves us with satisfaction as its outcome, a story well and truly told. It is Jack London's hack genius that makes us cheer for his Buck and want to lope with him in happy, savage honor back to the wild, running and howling with the pack."Now for some great paragraphs from this story. “Bucks first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour was filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilisation and flung into the heart of things primordial. No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be bored. Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety. All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb was in peril. There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.”“And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations feel from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still, cold nights, he pointed his nose at the star and howled long and wolf like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark. Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had found a yellow metal in the North…”“The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of the trial life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. He was too busy adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz he betrayed no impatience, shunned all offensive acts.”“All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the surrounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill-all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood. There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the solider, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.”“It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware of it. Each day rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose from al the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rusted forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.”“This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he was to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (gas he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! You can all but speak!”“The blood longing became stronger than ever before. He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because all of this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being. It advertised itself in all his movements, was apparent in the play of very muscle, spoke plainly as speak in the way he carried himself, and made his glorious furry coat if anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed. From his St. Bernard father he had inherited size and weight, but it was his shepherd mother who had given shape to that size and weight. His muzzle was the long wolf muzzle, save that it was larger than the muzzle of any wolf; and his head, somewhat broader, was the wolf head on a massive scale.”“There is a patience of the wild-dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself-that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belong peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food; and it belonged to Buck as he clung to the flank of the herd….”It has brought about three adaptations to film http://more2read.com/review/the-call-of-the-wild-by-jack-london/
Novels narrated from a dog’s point of view are rarities. I distinctly remember reading two, Fluke by the late great James Herbert, and Cujo by Stephen King (only partly from the dog’s POV). If the author’s talent is up to the task, it is quite a nice change in perspective (though I am sure you wouldn't want to read fiction from a canine perspective all the time unless you are a dog, even actual dogs don't want to do that, I have asked a few).Set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, The Call of the Wild is narrated in the third person but almost entirely from the dog’s point of view. The protagonist is Buck, a huge St. Bernard-Scotch Collie. (half St. Bernard and half sheepdog). At the beginning of the book he is living a happy life as a pet of a judge but is soon stolen by the judge’s gardener and sold to dog traders, one of whom beat the stuffing out of him to teach him his place in the world (as the trader sees it). After this traumatic and transformative experience he is soon sold off to Canadian mail dispatchers. The story of his life as a sled dog is quite harrowing, featuring a fight for supremacy among his teammates, being sold off again to inhumane ignoramus and almost starving to death. Buck goes through the wringer and survives admirably thanks to his tenacity, cunning, fortitude and general badassery. The title of the book The Call of the Wild only becomes a theme toward the end of the book, but I won’t spoil the book by elaborating on this.The book is generally very well written though but there is very little dialog, as the dogs are not Disneyfied / anthromorphosised talking animals. The hardship and abuse endured by the sled dogs is quite harrowing. If you think you’ve got it bad try being a sled dog (though if you are reading this the contingency is an unlikely one). The author Jack London clearly has a lot of affinity for dogs and feels a moral outrage at the abusive treatment they often receive from human beings. He also has an insight into dogs’ mentality as this passage demonstrates: “But the club of the man in the red sweater had beaten into him a more fundamental and primitive code. Civilized, he could have died for a moral consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller's riding-whip; but the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability to flee from the defence of a moral consideration and so save his hide.”“In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.” Ah! I wish my dog was so eloquent! The process of “decivilization” of Buck is an fascinating one, in order to survive he has to turn feral and it later transpires that Buck has some kind of primordial instinct for turning wild. That said he also has an almost conflicting desire to be loved by a human master, and for doing the best job he can as a sled dog, and later as a bodyguard and companion. What he also has above all other characters in this book is an indomitable will to live, and eventually to be free.If you love dogs this is a novel not to be missed. It is quite short, only about 170 pages, and there is an excellent free audiobook version from Librivox, very well read by Mark F. Smith (thank you sir!).
What do You think about The Call Of The Wild (2001)?
I first bought the book The Unabridged Jack London, because he had been a favorite of my Mom's, and I wanted to see what he was like. Well I fianlly got around to reading The Call of the Wild, and I gotta question what my mom saw in this book. It was such raw, horrifying violence nearly from begining to end. I could not understand the infactuation in the book or in Jack London. It was pretty cool though that the book was wrote through the eyes of a dog called Buck. But it also made for a boring long rambling read because of the lack of speaking in the book. I felt so disheartened at the beginning of the book because of what Buck went through, and then repulsed by what Buck had become. Needless to say I dont believe I will be reading anymore Jack London. It's not that he is a bad Author because he is one of the greats. But because this is really not the genre for me.
—Janie Johnson
I read this when I was a kid, and then again a few years ago, and this makes my third reading. That's quite a bit for a book that I have many problems with. The main problem I have is that I always get the feeling that London let his prejudices get in the way of his observations. As far as I know, this book and White Fang pretty much invented the genre of books being told from the animal's point of view. But it's not really the animal point of view we get. Rather, we get the viewpoint of the animal if the animal had a thoroughgoing belief in social darwinism.Buck moves from one human society to another. He starts with an indifferent and benign owner. From there, he gets introduced to a more "primitive" element when taken and sold up north as a sled dog. Here, he gets broken by whip and club, and learns the law of kill or be killed. From there, he moves on to a couple of sled teams, perfects his position according to that law. Then, he gets transferred to an even more cruel, and incompetent owner, one bound to kill the sled team and the people around him. Rescued, he falls in love with his next owner, and then he faces the call and becomes completely wild.A few problems: the law of wolf packs and dog sled teams has very little to do with what London describes here. Wolves don't kill each other. Dogs don't wait until the end of the day to then correct other dogs about errors they made on the sled team. The system of punishment that London ascribes as primitive law is very much a creation of people's misunderstanding. I don't doubt that London actually saw abused dogs in Alaska, but he also mis-interpreted what he saw.Another problem is the whole idea of Buck returning to the wild. The dog is a St. Bernard mix. It's virtually impossible to imagine this kind of dog becoming part of a wolf pack. He's basically a different species. Long ago, some wolves were brave enough to scavenge around nomadic people, and to stay in the vicinity when the nomads got close (kind of like pigeons in a park). The ones that fled stayed wolves. The ones with the genetic makeup to allow them to stay near man became, over time, dogs. Dogs are genetically different than wolves, and the difference comes from a fundamental difference in the fight or flight response. It is just as impossible to make an individual dog wild as it is to tame an animal caught in the wild. The idea is fanciful, but it does not happen.From a narrative point of view, it makes no sense to me that Buck's strongest calls to the wild happen when he has finally found an owner that he truly loves. If anything, from both a natural and a narrative point of view, this relationship would strengthen Buck's ties to men, not weaken them.I've got alot of affection for this book, and like White Fang even more, but for all it's grit, I still get the feeling that this book is closer to Disney than it is to true observation. It owes more to London's imagination of what a dog might think then it does to any serious study of dogs.
—Duffy Pratt
El año pasado me topé con una caseta de la fiesta del libro en la que había una sección de libros en inglés. No demasiada variedad en la oferta pero habría ediciones muy bonitas y algunos precios razonables. Ver libros en inglés en mi ciudad sigue siendo un poco novedad por eso estuve escogiendo un muy buen rato cual de todos me llevaría. Y en medio de todas esas ediciones bonitas estaba este librito. En mi caso particular desde muy niña me han gustado mucho los animales, gracias a mi hermano y a los muchos animales que vivieron conmigo en mi niñez: canarios, pericos, conejos, hamsters y perros. Me llegué a enfermar por estar con ellos todo el día, pero por no eso no dejan de gustarme. Por eso este libro se vino conmigo a casa y leerlo ha sido recordar mi amor por los animales.Traducido como "La llamada de la selva" o "La llamada de lo salvaje" este libro es harto conocido para muchos lectores. Muchos lo leyeron de niños pero no es mi caso. Sólo puedo contar que es la historia de un perro llamado Buck, mezcla de pastor con san bernardo, un perro enorme y feliz que vivía en la paz de una finca del valle de Santa Clara en el sur de Estados Unidos a finales del siglo XIX. En medio de la relajación del campo, Buck es robado por un trabajador de la finca endeudado y es vendido como perro de trineo para ser llevado al norte del hemisferio, a Alaska, en medio de la fiebre del oro de Klondike a finales de este siglo. Siendo así, la vida de Buck cambia totalmente en medio de las duras condiciones climáticas, en medio del frío y el hambre, y mediante va cambiando de dueños su naturaleza salvaje, que ha perdido por cientos de años de domesticación va regresando a la vida.Reseña completa: http://rapsodia-literaria.blogspot.co...
—Nina Rapsodia
