A Woman in the Polar Night

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She seems happy to act as a housewife to the two hunters, her husband and Karl, and celebrates their courage and manliness. well, the words that kept coming to mind as I read were things like marvellous, delightful, plucky, and smart. The men have absolutely no faith in her, and when they leave her alone for a week (about the only chapter I could stomach) she literally excelled and sorted everything without thinking twice. Obwohl der Inhalt des Buches sehr alt ist, ist es trotzdem interessant und ausgenommen einiger Punkte tatsächlich zeitlos.

By the end you see that the experience has changed her: she’ll never fret over trivial things again. In fact, this book has some similarities with that modus operandi, except Christiane is waiting for her husband in the northern part of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, and the household is a two-room hut, shared by them plus a younger hunter, Karl, that is heated by a broken unreliable stove and buried in snow they have to dig themselves out of half the time, and their dinners are constructed of oats and seal meat. I mostly work in Scandinavia but I was once part of an expedition to north Siberia and have taken shorter trips to Jan Mayen, Svalbard and Greenland for fieldwork or courses. And suddenly I realize that civilisation is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency because it cannot draw its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true.Then the 'Hunters' (ew) come back and she's like 'oooo thank goodness I can feel safe again and I must make them their morning coffee and flit about like a useless woman'. Northern lights of incredible intensity stream over the sky; their bright rays shooting downward, look like gleaming rods of glass. My head is spinning with the profoundness of the arctic experience and of Christiane's humor, reflections and revelations of her year in Spitsbergen.

I feel quite indifferent towards this book- it was interesting to read about her experiences as someone who had absolutely no knowledge of anything to do with the Arctic prior to reading. 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. It is the interaction of light on the landscape and respect for what nature offers that begins to grab us and pull us into her world. She mentions leaving all the servants and her house in Austria, but there is one mention of their daughter, apparently a teenager at the time of the journey.This is my second read for Annabookbel’s NordicFINDS challenge, and I’ve enjoyed picking all these books off my TBR (surely the challenge I’ve been able to fulfil most numerously from the TBR, apart from 20 Books of Summer, ever! Die Autorin berichtet von ihrem Jahr in der Arktis, die sie 1934/1935 aufsuchte, um dort mit ihrem Mann und einem Pelzjäger zu leben. It won't be too lonely for you because at the northeast corner of the coast, about sixty miles from here, there is another hunter living, an old Swede. I could stay by the warm stove in the hut, knit socks, paint from the window, read thick books in the remote quiet, and, not least, sleep to my heart's content. There were passages that were so sparse, that it felt like it was mimicking the world she was living in.