The Last Wolf

"The Last Wolf" features a classic, obsessed Krasznahorkai narrator, a man hired to write (by mistake, by a glitch of fate) the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. This miserable experience is narrated all in a single sentence as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary wintry Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender. The Last Wolf is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell with the narrator trapped in his own experience enfolding the reader in the exact same sort of entrapment to and beyond the end, with its first full-stop period of the book. "Herman": a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion, is asked to clear a forest's last noxious beasts. In Herman I: the Game Warden, he begins with great zeal, although in time he suspects that maybe he was on the wrong scent. Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game. In Herman II: The Death of a Craft, the same situation is viewed by strange visitors to the region. Hyper-sexualized aristocratic officers on a very extended leave are enjoying a saturnalia with a bevy of beauties in the town nearest the forest. With a sense of effete irony, they interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman, and in the end, only we are left to relish the magic bouquet of this escapade.