THE HOUR OF THE WOLF

A child of an assassinated Pakistani opposition leader writes of years of trauma.

“In a world of excess and power and all their rot, what besides love forces us to be pure?” So writes Bhutto in one of the many apothegmatic moments that punctuate a grim account of life under the thumb of a man who demands sacrifice in one of a number of “controlling relationships.” Known for her work as a writer and coming from a prominent family, she is in a “public gaze…[that] makes him uncomfortable”; he gaslights her constantly while demanding that, for instance, she not wear makeup “because it made me look like a mouse with eyeliner on”; he denies her the possibility of the children she longs for. For complex reasons—and perhaps a little Stockholm syndrome at work—she acquiesces to one soul-scarring demand after another, hoping, as she admits, that he would become “more like the man I had built him up to be in my head.” In the course of this long campaign of belittlement and emotional extortion, Bhutto finds Barry Lopez’s classic book Of Wolves and Men and, as the old saw goes, weighs wolves and humans in the balance and finds humans wanting, with wolves and their descendants, our beloved dogs, helping her find a path to personal freedom and even, now, happiness. The mix of meditations on wolves, dogs, and nature in general doesn’t always cohere with the deeply personal, often self-doubting passages surrounding them, but in the end, apart from her own psychic breakthrough, some graceful realizations shine through—one, for instance, that our dogs “teach us about love and time and the smallness of our own beings and place in the world.”

A sometimes uneasy but ultimately winning blend of natural history and fraught personal memoir.