Original language: English Original title: To Build a Fire
Year: 1908
rating: highly recommended
This story naturalist author White Fang introduces us to a man, a victim of its boundless arrogance, in conflict the wise Mother Nature.
In the middle of a violent wave of cold, a man decides to venture into the territory of Yukon to study the possibility of extracting timber from the area in the following spring while his teammates waiting at base camp.
From the beginning ignored the signs that the environment is going to rule, and warnings from the locals. As the narrator explains, is a man without imagination "but obviously is able to feel the cold, it lacks the tools to interpret the meaning of the empirical data. Not so with his dog, faithful companion in their foolish journey, whose behavior should be put on notice to the owner: cold levels have surpassed the barrier of what is bearable for being warm-blooded. Finally, the man will realize that something is wrong and will take a fight against time for survival.
The instinct-right dichotomy is present throughout the story, perhaps even a very explicit way: all that XXI century as a reader I can blame it on Jack London is your desire to give us everything too "mascadito." But, rather, an opinion fórmense yourself, you can read the story on-line in both Castilian ( here ) and English ( here ).
By the way, the final and most acclaimed version of this story, and now I review, is that of 1908, rewritten by Jack London from a story he had published in 1902. Let him that the first is ... more benign.
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