For a recent review in e-flux, Natasha Marie Llorens discusses Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure by Sara Nadal-Melsió. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“[A] meticulous analysis of disharmony’s pivotal political role in a European project that is obsessed with the disavowal of such… Europe and the Wolf traces the fraught polysemy of the “wolf”—the animal, the mythic symbol of threat and otherness, and also the dissonant interval in a tuning system invented in the Baroque era—as a loose conceptual framework to present close readings of artworks by Pere Portabella and Carles Santos, Allora & Calzadilla, Anri Sala, and Tarek Atoui. Nadal-Melsió maps the notion of “Europe” through each artist’s practice against the background of the Catalan independence movement, the uneasy colonial status of Puerto Rico, the violent conflict in Lebanon as a theater for European proxy wars, and in the challenge posed to Europe’s political imagination by its Former East and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. She follows “the figure of the wolf, an acoustic condensation that bears witness to the discontinuous and dissonant ensemble, the fragile organization of differences, that we call ‘Europe.’”