This... was one of the weirdest things I have ever read. It was bewildering. I understood in broad strokes the steps of what happened: narrator is a detective who is hired by a man to track down his runaway wife, follows her trail into and through the taiga. But woven through and around this simple narrative is a bunch of bonkers-ass shit with sex and critters and violence, and lots of references to Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood – sometimes in combination. It felt like more of an exercise in elaborate language and allegory and symbolism, than it did a like a narrative. I assume that was all very deliberate, and that's fine, but it didn't really do much for me. 

It definitely feels like there is some exploration of the destructiveness of capitalistic development. As I'm thinking about it, I have also had an idea of some additional possible subtext

(I feel like the detective and the runaway wife are aspects of the same person, and her husband is violent and she has run away into her internal forest? Like maybe most of the major characters are actually her – the wild child and the translator. The weird stuff with the tiny doll-like creatures is possibly miscarriage related? And the shack where they stay in the village, where "something died" is her uterus? and she's trapped in there by the wolf/her husband?)

. I'm not really sure, and I'd have to reread it to explore that idea further... and I don't want to! So we'll just let this one be a meh from me. I'd have a field day with it if I were reading it for a lit class, though.