A Woman in the Polar Night

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I did enjoy more the tales of finding a tiny bit of ancient dried yeast so they could make bread, etc. In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband.

I think if I would've read this in November or December with the long winter ahead it would've been depressing, knowing what was ahead of me every time I stepped out the door of my house. The sweet stories in this book were the ones about a white fox adopting them, as well as a seal later on. The young woman in this story is married to a man that is a hunter/trapper who takes expeditions to the Artic and lives in a hut on the small island of Spitsbergen. The cookie also tracks the behavior of the user across the web on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. She lets us imagine the play of endless light, receding sunlight, and 24 hour darkness for months at a time and the effect it has on humans.I mean, I’ll read an older book that has foxhunting in the background (Angela Thirkell, I’m thinking of you) but not a modern book or one concentrating on it; here, the pull of the description of polar life outweighed the discomfort, however, it wasn’t all entirely of necessity and there is talk of making good furs to sell for ladies to wear which was difficult to read. Es gibt da Überraschungen in der Weltferne und der langen Dunkelheit, denen man in solcher tiefgründigen Eindeutigkeit sonst kaum begegnet. She captures the majesty feels as she wanders in this place and learns the moods of the seasons, and the beauty of the terrain.

Most of the time I had no idea where she even was, she referred to every stopping point as 'the hut' which had me totally lost - taking me yet further out of the story. Her transformation from the excitement of arriving on the island, which reads like an Enid Blyton style adventure of the day (1930s), to a fear of what she has let herself in for as the sun goes down in October, not to rise until February, is perfectly described. Blöder Titel, hässliches Cover, und man muss es wohlwollend lesen, um über das Frauenbild der Autorin wegzukommen, es geht immer wieder mal um Hausfraulichkeit und "weibliche Koketterie" (dabei kann sie schießen und kommt entspannt klar in ihrer kleinen rußigen Hütte). I was fascinated by the details of Ritter’s daily tasks, but also by how her perspective on the landscape changed.My only regret is that I wish there were photographs included in the edition from the 1950s that I read. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies… But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic’s harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life. They told of journeys by water and over ice, of the animals and the fascination of the wilderness, of the strange light over the landscape, of the strange illumination of one’s own self in the remoteness of the polar night.