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Hello,
Welcome to the first week of our new Book Club! I, for one, could not wait to dig into A Woman in the Polar Night this week. I’d read it about two years ago, but I realised today that I remembered more about the end of the book than the beginning. The process of Christiane Ritter’s arrival felt new to me all over again.
There’s so much to process in this part of the book. It is 1934, and Christiane leaves her comfortable life in Austria - seemingly on a whim - to sail up the Norwegian fjords to Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago. She’s joining her husband, Hermann, and, it transpires once she gets there, a younger man called Karl, to live for a year in the isolated Arctic wastes. Arriving in fog, it is a long time before she actually sees the surrounding landscape. Until then, she engages in the business of survival: wrangling with the sooty, cracked stove that heats their tiny hut and cooks their food, learning to sleep in a bunk, salting cabbages, and coming to terms with a diet of seal meat. She also falls in love with a young Arctic Fox called Mikkl.
What struck me the most this time around was Ritter’s portrayal of her husband, who has been changed profoundly by his time in the wild. In his previous life, we infer, he was prone to fussiness and frustration. Now, he is preternaturally calm, partly due to a deep love of this territory, and partly because he has learned patience from the slowness of life there. ‘He has changed in the Arctic,’ she writes as she sees him again for the first time. ‘His beaming serenity makes a strange impression.’ Later, in the face of Hermann and Karl’s insouciance toward the food supply, she remarks: ‘It is grotesque how carefree they are.’
How things will change. But for now, the landscape feels unnerving and hostile, excepting the brief moments of sun. A high point for me is when Christiane gets to take a bath in a washed-up tub; but I worry about the carbon monoxide emissions of that stove.
There’s a great article about Christiane Ritter, written by Lucy Jones, here.
I’d love to know what you think so far. I can’t wait to hear your impressions in the comments.
Coming up next:
January 13th - 19th: Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8
January 20th - 26th: Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13
January 27th - 31st: Chapters 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18
Take care,
Katherine
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