[A] haunting, genre-defying memoir ... Though in Sophie R. Lewis’s elegant translation from the French, it becomes clear that 'memoir' is another word that doesn’t quite fit this slender yet expansive book. Martin writes as an anthropologist ... She writes about philosophy, too, noticing that everyone around her tries to find a reason for what happened because 'it is hard to leave sense unmade.' She questions the human propensity to try to assimilate everything into familiar terms ... What Martin describes in this book isn’t so much a search for meaning as an acceptance of its undoing.

[A] slim, stirring book ... Despite the harrowing experience at its core, In the Eye of the Wild couldn’t be further from a conventional survival memoir. Less intrepid and life-affirming than frank and brooding, it neither revels in the sensational violence of the bear attack nor offers a palatable narrative of recovery and redemption. Instead, Martin sets out to transcend familiar modes in order to let the terrible strangeness of her experience speak ... In the Eye of the Wild thus takes its place within the tradition of philosophical attempts to destabilize the human/animal binary and rethink the relation.

[Martin's] story to begin with is simple, and beautifully gruesome ... this short but chewy book thickens up into a stew of memoir, drama, anthropology and metaphysics – or how the immovable object moved, and changed ... we get a fascinating, ambitious exploration of animism – the border between human and animal – and how she sees her encounter with the bear as a manifestation of a breakdown ... The book represents both a collapse and a rebuilding. The language, in Sophie R Lewis’s elegant translation, is often seductive ... Martin, however, doesn’t seek sympathy from the reader; she simply wants us to share in her attempts to understand what has happened to her. What more could we ask for from a book?

Martin’s narrative, with the bones of a personal essay and the lift of a prose poem, reciprocates the creature’s failed act of incorporation, and hunts for beauty in what remains occluded and apart. The result is heady and obsessive, as Martin smashes again and again against the limits of what anyone can know ... As a narrator, Martin can be humorless (understandably), and is often frustrated, angry, lost ... Metaphors of art or Eros might seduce Martin, but political analogies leave her cold. Yet she has written a strenuously geopolitical book ... Martin is thrilling when she tests ideas, but she’s less adept at action, at animating a scene, and she can bury a memory’s importance in unnecessary detail. More oppressive are the book’s bursts of self-importance, although it feels churlish to pick on what they likely reflect—a need to rationalize trauma, to ignite it with meaning ... Her real concern seems to be finding value in what can so easily be lost ... If the bear serves as Martin’s mirror, Martin also contains traces of him ... we are made who we are by that which flows through us. Toward the end of the book, Martin makes this idea beautifully concrete.

A slim volume of acutely personal, semi-academic nonfiction composed in lucid, compressed prose. Straddling the visceral and the cerebral, the book is at once a riveting memoir of a life-altering encounter with a wild animal and a heady exploration of borders and liminality; the self as it interacts with, and absorbs some part of, the other; and the limits of anthropology as a method of understanding all of this ... Captivating and eminently readable ... Given the intensity and duration of Martin’s ordeal, there’s an astonishing absence of self-pity here. Nor is there any flimsy moral to the story ... This tug-of-war around meaning-making and meaning-refusal becomes the central tension in the book, which swivels decisively away from the familiar, Christianity-encoded narrative of suffering and redemption that organizes so many Western memoirs of trauma.

Stunning ... With exquisite prose and sharp observations, Martin reveals how curiosity can uncover the most vivid aspects of the human condition. This is a profound look at the violence and beauty of life.