A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
Written in 1934 - a fur-trapper’s wife spends a year in a hunting shelter on the island of Spitsbergen in northern Norway. I loved this one.
Ritter’s writing is lean, each word essential as polar kit.
The hut is located between Misery Bay and Distress Hook, and looks like “a tiny box thrown up by the sea.” It is surrounded by skeletons, skis, tubs, and a post to lure the polar bears that arrive with autumn’s pack ice. Christiane jokes that she will make pets of the bears: Hermann doesn’t laugh. He teaches her how to shoot: in the chest first, then through the brain.
Everything is about survival. Her nearest neighbour is sixty miles away, and water for that first coffee takes an hour and half to find. Mist drifts in through the window. Later, ice forms on the interior walls.
Ritter’s writing is lean, each word essential as polar kit. She is a cool-headed observer, and the absence of ego and spin gives her account an enchantment and freshness that sets it apart from the modern, self-absorbed, misery memoir.
A fascinating account. I’ve read A Woman in the Polar Night twice and was just as affected by Christiane Ritter’s adventure and Mikkl’s charm the second time around. Is Mikkl one of travel literature’s most endearing creatures? His fate made for some nerve-wracking reading …
Five stars.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler
Antarctica by Gabrielle Walker
Dark Matter by Michelle Paver
