4.5... I read reviews about this book before reading it and saw that it was banned in a couple of countries so I was intrigued about the why...?

The way the book is written it is about a dog named Buck starting with his infancy. He gets kidnapped and sold off and traded among men for a sled dog in Alaska. He learns the way of vicious and savage men and adapts his life to theirs. A man named Thornton finally saves him from getting killed with a club and he falls in love with this new master. But while on a camping trip he discovers his true nature without a master. The nature of the wild beast he once was. His instincts come back to him as a wolf dog and soon discovers this as freedom and happiness.

THIS IS JUST AN OPINION!!! NO NEED TO GET WORKED UP!
The other way to look at this book, deeply, is to read it as the human condition. It got banned bc it shows socialism in a bad light, supposedly. I really don't want to even say it WAS about socialism. I'd like to say that this is the everyday human condition in every part of every country (Capitalism, fascism, socialism, communism etc). The poor or helpless get beaten down, threatened, cajoled to be submissive and easier to control under the thumb of any regime be it third world to first world. Or maybe it isn't this obvious like in the middle class. All it is is circumstance and luck and you become a slave in a different way. Learning to survive in the world you were born into or given. You're FREE until you say/do the wrong thing. The Call of the Wild is about finding your freedom and happiness in the way you know how without being a slave to anyone or anything (ex. money, materialism) except your own will. Who wouldn't want to live like this? Is it even possible in this day and age?

I don't want to get political bc there are too many opinions and I don't want to be cussed out here or told I am stupid but it is a good book. I assume it is easier to write about wolves than humans bc it makes for a better story. I recommend if you want to work your brain a bit and figure out this puzzle called humanity. I will read London's other works bc he is controversial and that always makes reading an author's book more fun.

"الصبر أساسي جداً في حياة البراري، صبر عنيد مُثابر لا يمل ولا يكل، كالحياة نفسها. هذا الصبر هو الذي يجعل العنكبوت ساكناً في شبكته لساعات بلا نهاية، ويجعل الحية تظل لوقت طويل مُلتفة على نفسها، والنمر ساكناً في مكمنه لساعات بلا عدد. إنه الصبر الذي تعرفه على وجه الخصوص الكائنات التي تعتمد في غذائها على سلب حياة كائنات أخرى."

رواية "نداء البراري" هي رواية مُمتعة ورمزية بإمتياز.. غلبت الرمزية على المُتعة في النصف الثاني من الرواية فكان أحياناً يتخلله الملل.

تدور أحداث الرواية حول الكلب "باكي" الذي وجد نفسه مرة وحدة بعد العيشة المُتحضرة والرغيدة، في البراري، وفُرض عليه أن يتعامل بقانون الغاب والبرية في كُل شيء.. أن ترى الحياة من منظور كلب لهو أمر مُثير للسخرية حقاً، من أفعالنا، نحن بنو البشر، من الطُرق التي نتعامل بها مع الحيوانات، ومع أنفسنا، مع كل تلك الآمال الزائفة التي نحبو إليها، وكُل ما يُريده الكلب هو تربيته على رأسه ليكون في قمة سعادته!

طوال أحداث الرواية ستجد إسقاطات أغلبها سياسية، عن القطيع، عن الذي يُحاول أن يخرج عن القطيع فيُعاقب وقد يصل إلى القتل، عن القيادة وخصائصها، قيادة قد تجدها إسقاطاً لقيادة البلد أو العمل أو أي شيء ستجدها صالحة ومُتطابقة.
طوال أحداث الرواية، كان هُناك صدمات مُتتالية بالموت والفشل.. وحتى تغير شخصية بطلنا "باكي" الذي تغير تغيراً ملحوظاً، من ذلك الكلب الراقي إلى ذلك الكلب الذي قد يتعارك من أجل قطعة لحم!

ختاماً..
كانت هذه تجربتي الثانية مع "جاك لندن" وبكل تأكيد كانت تجربة جيدة، مع قلمه البسيط بدون أي تعقيد في المعنى وحتى الرمزية بسيطة وليست مُتفلسفة أو مُعقدة.. رواية جيدة حولت للعديد من الأفلام والمُسلسلات وحتى الرسوم المُتحركة.

يُنصح بها.

Fascinating, but also far too brutal for my tender little brain.

The Call of the Wild is the classic dog novella, the book to check out if you want to know how dogs were portrayed in classic literature. Nobody could deny Jack London's reputation in his genre, and thousands of readers seem to love his dog stories. He was certainly a good author, as it is almost impossible to think of any other author who might have been able to paint such a dark, realistic and captivating picture of the Alaskan landscape, of nature's rudeness and the frameworks of the laws of nature.

This is the story of Buck, a dog who has suffered through almost everything a dog could have to suffer through in his life. He is a dog born to luxury and kidnapped into wilderness, who has to learn to adapt himself to the rules of nature in order to survive, who has to realize that Charles Darwin's quote from Origin of Species is not merely a quote: "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."

The point of this novel completely forgot to make its presence felt to me, however. Maybe London wrote about how you have to accept the rules of nature, maybe he wrote about the strong connections between human beings and dogs, maybe he wrote about the cruelty of humans, maybe even about the cruelty of nature - all those are motifs certainly recognizable in this novel. To me, they appeared as if they were randomly interspersed into the book just for the sake of being included. However, that doesn't mean this book doesn't earn its classic status. It is a good book after all, I just didn't care about it as much as I did about White Fang.

In my opinion, White Fang is way more intriguing than this novel, yet for some reason, The Call of the Wild is the more popular and beloved one, so I recommend reading this first and White Fang afterwards as it seems like I was let down by my high expectations after having read and loved White Fang years ago.

Κλασσικό και αγαπημένο.
Περιπέτεια, ανεξερεύνητες περιοχές, η τρέλα του χρυσού και η δύναμη της φύσης, σε μια τόσο άγνωστη για εμάς εποχή.
Αλλά το βιβλίο είναι πολύ περισσότερο από αυτά. Είναι η αναζήτηση του καθενός από μας και η πορεία προς την πραγματική φύση μας. Είναι ο τρόπος που το περιβάλλον πλάθει το χαρακτήρα μας. Και είναι βέβαια και η ακατανίκητη δύναμη της θέλησης και του πάθους για τη ζωή.
Το ότι όλα αυτά δίνονται μέσα από τα μάτια ενός σκύλου, σε μια φαινομενικά απλή ιστορία, κάνει το βιβλίο αυτό ακόμα πιο σημαντικό.

I love adventure stories. When I was a child, I greedily devoured any book that involved wilderness, danger and action. Jack London's stories were some of my favorites. My dad bought me his books on the downlow, as my mother had in her mind that such stories were not "ladylike.'' My dad supported me in my love of adventure and supplied me with all sorts of unladylike tales -- Tarzan, The Jungle Book, Jack London, and all sorts of wonderful stories that carried me away to far off places. Very unladylike places.

Out of all of those wonderful stories, Call of the Wild was one of my favorites. It was the first story I read where an animal is a realistic main character, not a talking caricature in a children's story. Buck is a dog who gets stolen from his owner and sold as a sled dog. The changes he goes through....the transformation from pet to a wild animal is fascinating. Back then (and still today) I wanted to hop into the story and kick the butts of the abusive men who train the dog to be a working dog by whipping and clubbing him. The abuse of the animals in this story is realistic, but the horrible humans who mistreat their dogs seem to meet grisly fates in the Alaskan wilderness. Karma. I celebrated with Buck finally had a master he loved....and supported how he blended into the wilderness at the end. I always felt that ending was totally appropriate. He had morphed into a wild animal, not a pet, so he deserved his freedom in the end.

Jack London was definitely a man's man. He lived hard, worked hard, and died hard. He was the highest paid author of his day before he died at 40 in 1916 of an accidental morphine overdose. It has been suggested that the overdose might not have been accidental. He was very ill and dying from a mix of self abuse (alcoholism) and disease (several afflictions caught in the tropics that never went away), and might have decided to go the way of several of the characters in his story....OD on morphine and quietly slip away. I can see him wanting to leave on his own terms, in peace, at the house in California that he loved. But that's all just conjecture....we can never know if it was accidental or on purpose. I think it's wonderful that his stories are more than 100 years old now and still catch the attention of readers today.

I listened to an audiobook version of this classic novella. Narrated by Patrick Lawlor, the audio is almost 3.5 hours long. Lawlor reads at a steady, even pace with good inflection. I have hearing loss, but was able to easily hear and understand his narration.

Call of the Wild is one of 100 books chosen as part of The Great American Read. I can totally see how this classic about life in the Alaskan wilderness deserves a spot on the list. This is the 7th book on the list that I have read/re-read on my quest to read through the entire list.

Jack London wrote many short stories and novels and even some plays and poetry. His most famous novels are Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden.

Il bosco chiama

L'amore per la libertà corre nella radura, sfugge nei ruscelli, impregna le nebbie e sussurra tra le fronde delle foreste.
Jack London ristabilisce le gerarchie e ridimensiona l'ossessivo desiderio di controllo dell'uomo: è la natura primordiale a decidere le sorti, ma senza calpestare a priori i combattenti sul terreno di battaglia.
Il richiamo della foresta è un intenso inno alla libertà, un'opera che riporta coi piedi per terra e insegna a porci in maniera paritaria con tutti gli altri, non al di sopra.
Indimenticabile.

i am a dog obsessive. i'm nuts. dogs are my moby dick. they're my opera-house in the jungle. if i had a genie in a bottle, i'd wish away all human life (including my own) so dogs could take over the world. wait. that'd be wish number two. number one would be that i had an olympic sized swimming pool filled with dogs and i could do a few laps. then i'd erase humanity. seriously. my dog is the coolest guy i've ever met, my best friend, and love of my life. if it sounds weird: piss off. i don't wanna know you.

so, i kinda can't not like this book. and it's weird that i've never read it. well, today i did. picked up this new puffin edition and polished it off in one sitting.

good goddamn is this a great book. as an adventure story it's just incredible and then all that regression shit? wow. Buck, the main dog, goes back through his bloodline, down his ancestry... where he watches a primitive man, all hunched over and furry, peer out the mouth of a cave into the cold blackness of the UNKNOWN. there's some seriously badass jungian shit going on here. spooky and ineffable and just fucking gorgeous. masterpiece, baby, masterpiece.

and check this passage in which Buck and the other dogs chase a rabbit through a snowy, moonlit forest:

"All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plains 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 which 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 soldier, 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."

yes.

Jack London'ı çocukluğumda dahi okumadım. O yüzden benim için geç kalınmış bir yazar diyebilirim."Vahşetin Çağrısı" daha önce izlediğim "Beyaz Tanrı" filminin temel hikayesi olabilir diye düşünüyorum şu anda. İnsanın vahşiliği ve acımasızlığı ile özüne dönen bir köpek Buck. Yediği sopalar, kamçılar, gördüğü işkenceler Buck'ın vahşi doğanın çağrısına eninde sonunda kulak vermesi adeta bir Rambo köpek öyküsü. London'ın doğayı ve köpekleri tasvirine bayıldım. Kendi hayatından kesitler taşıdığını düşündüğüm o acımasız göçebe hayat son derece gerçekçi bir dille anlatılmış. Yer yer içim ezildi, yer yer öç alma duygusu kapladı içimi. Bir çırpıda bitti nitekim.

The Call of the Wild, that manly man's outdoors adventure tale! Oh how I loved this story as a young teen. During New England winters I would even imagine braving the Alaskan cold, just me and my dog. My dog was a lab-spaniel mix with stumpy legs and a donut-gut from begging during coffee-breaks at my granddad's car repair shop down the road. She wasn't about to be pulling sledges through snowdrifts. And I was no more athletic. In fact, the two of us together looked something like this...

My thoughts on reading The Call of the Wild continue to change as I age. The status says that I've read this book 3 times, but it's more than that. I will not alter my rating, as I did after a reread in 2016 (see below), but my early childhood love for this story has waned, if only a tad. London wrote Buck as if he were an indestructible force of nature. When growing up, that's how I probably imagined my own dog. Maybe it's the progress of time that changes our enthusiasm and feelings to something closer to reality. Yet, I still love this dog. Finally, I am more accepting of Buck's answer to that ending call of the wild. He must go. It is the right place for him.

____________________________________________________________
2016 review

**Spoilers ahead**

The Call of the Wild was not the first book that I remember reading as a boy, but it’s the first book that I remember loving. I had a growing enthusiasm for reading. I loved dogs. These two things fit together. That was around the age of nine or ten. (A few years later, I would pick up Cujo by Stephen King. Another dog book. Not at all the same!) Anyway, the story of Buck resonated with me because he never gave up, and through London’s words I felt like I caught of glimpse inside a dog’s mind.

There came a point near the end of the story, when Buck realizes deep loss. It is the final straw that breaks his connection to man and domesticity. His mourning still struck me with sadness. But Buck’s mourning didn’t last long because he felt the pull of the wild: The Call, and of course by that time, this was the only place for him. As a kid, and even now, I was pulled in two directions by this action. Every man, save one, had used or beaten Buck for their own gain and purposes. But, the leaving kind of meant saying goodbye to Buck.
n  

” Again Buck knew them as things heard in that other world which persisted in his memory. He walked to the centre of the open space and listened. It was the call, the many-noted call, sounding more luringly and compellingly than ever before. And as never before, he was ready to obey... The last tie was broken. Man and the claims of man no longer bound him.”

n
Then versus Now: Before today, I had given The Call of the Wild 5 stars without a second thought. It was my favorite childhood book. How could I rate it less? Now I know that things change, including those childhood memories of the story that I loved. I’ve read a lot of books between then and now, many of those have been very, very good. In short, that’s the reason for the change in my rating. The Call of the Wild is one of those books that will remain a sentimental favorite - still very good, worth reading, and one that this boy will not forget.

Side note: Found my cat studying me while listening to this audiobook. I’m pretty sure that look said, “What‘s this dog sh Ron?” before sauntering out of the room, tail held high ...... Okay I’m joking - his tail may have been down. :)

توجه: این کتاب در دو ادیشن ترجمه شده. یکی نسخه اصلی یکی نسخه کوتاه شده نوجوانان. من به اشتباه نسخه نوجوانان رو خوندم که کمتر بود و بعدش فهمیدم که نسخه کامل‌تری هم ازش وجود داره.
***
سگی که از خونه دزدیده می‌شه و به کار برای جویندگان طلا در شمال کانادا گماشته می‌شه. کارش کشیدن سورتمه‌س.
به نظرم داستان جالبی بود چون راویش یه سگ بود. احساسات سگ‌ها رو خیلی بامزه نوشته بود و گاهی خیلی کمیک می‌شد. جالبه که حدس بزنی تو فکر یه سگ چیه. حتا یه جاهایی خواب می‌دید و خواب های یه سگ رو می‌دیدیم. نسخه‌ی من خیلی کوتاه بود و حدس مي‌زنم برای همین خیلی کم توصیفی بود و بیشتر مثل یه پیرنگ بود که یکم توصیف داره کنارش. اما متن اصلی فکر کنم از این نظر زیبایی‌های مخصوصی داشته باشه. زیبایی‌هایی که به طبیعت سرد و برفی شمال کانادا پرداخته باشه. رودها و یخچال‌ها و سرما و برف.
رفتار ساده‌لوحانه سگ‌ها، زود باوری‌شون، فراموشی ناراحتی‌ها، این‌ها همه مثل رفتار بچه‌هاست و توی این کتاب خیلی بامزه نوشته شده.

داستان درباره اینه که سگ طی ماجراهایی صاحبان متفاوتی پیدا می‌کنه و هرکی یه جور باهاش رفتار می‌کنه. این که سگ خونگی‌ای بوده باید یاد بگیره چطوری توی طبیعت سخت زنده بمونه. البته ژن‌هایی که از نیاکانش بهش رسیده توی این راه بهش کمک می‌کنن و به صورت غریزی می‌تونه کم‌کم گلیمشو از آب بیرون بکشه و به سردسته سگ‌های سورتمه‌کش تبدیل بشه. آخر هم یه صاحاب مهربون پیدا می‌کنه و قصه جنبه عاطفی پیدا می‌کنه.
کنش انتهایی داستان هم کشمش سگ برای پیوستن به طبیعته. درواقع آوای وحش که همیشه این رو به طبیعت فرامیخونه و این تا به حال فرصت جواب دادن به این آوا رو نداشته.

می‌شه گفت درباره‌ی وراثت و طبیعی بودن هست یکم. می‌گن وقتی نویسنده داشته این رو می‌نوشته یه نسخه از کتاب داروین همراهش بوده -توی سفری که به شمال داشته برای کشف طلا- برای همین می‌شه نتیجه گرفت که انتخاب طبیعی و زنده موندن در این شرایط مسئله زیرمتنی بوده که می‌خواسته با این قصه انتقال بده.

این مقا��ه درباره‌ی نوشته‌شدن این کتاب توسط جک لندن نوشته و عکس‌های خیلی خوبی هم داره. پیشنهادش می‌کنم بسیار.
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