I fell upon this book at The Book Hive in Norwich, and read it immediately. This beautiful new edition of a 1934 is a fresh and joyous account of a woman wintering over in the Arctic. She says everyone should spend a year in the Arctic to get their priorities right.
Christiane Ritter, a visual artist from Austria, spent the winter in an extremely isolated small hut with her husband and another hunter in Spitsbergen/Svalbard. She was often alone, and her writing about this is some of my favourite in the book. At one point, she spends nine days on her own trying to stop the hut being entirely buried under snow and ice. After the storm is over, peace reigns. “But it is as though things up here have acquired a light of their own, as though they themselves emitted rays of the most beautiful and mysterious hues. All the mountains, tremendous in the foreground and sharply edged in the distance, are glassy-bright with rigid ice, glass bright the foreland and glass bright the cliffs along the shore that, transfigured by frost and surf into high, round domes of ice, drop steeply into the sea”.
Her experience of loss of self and sense of connection to all other living things at this point reminded me strongly of a beautiful moment in Alan Lightman’s book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, where he feels a connection to “all of nature, and to the entire cosmos” (see here).
The three hunt, clean and repair the hut, and undertake perilous journeys. To have a woman’s perspective is intriguing, including on how she is treated by the men, and how she observes her own responses to extreme conditions. Her particular version of rar (Arctic insanity) involves trying to clean the hut’s floor. It turns into an ice rink.
The hut is not a pure escape from the world. Some chilly blasts of news from rare visitors remind us that this is the 1930s and a worrying time: one of them asks, is there a war yet? More cheerfully, when the group visit their neighbour Sven (who is in fact very far away), they are impressed by his two charming dogs. Whenever the people are talking, the dogs wag their tails. Christiane realises that as it’s usually just Sven and the dogs, they are used to him talking just to them – so they assume this is what he is doing now, and reply.
There is a brilliant sharp foreword from Sara Wheeler, another author who writes beautifully about cold places (see the excellent Terra Incognita). A real treat.
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