A Woman in the Polar Night

Product Information

The cookie also tracks the behavior of the user across the web on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.

He swears at women in the Arctic, their frivolity and obstinacy, which are quite out of place here considering how inexperienced they are. 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.In the late summer and autumn, Ritter, her husband, and their friend, the hunter Karl, live well, eating eider ducks and duck eggs, seals and foxes they shoot, and wandering on the shore in the beautiful landscape. There's so much lovely stuff in here - days and days without sunlight, being stuck in a shed surrounded by snow, the weird sounds in the Arctic - so it seems likes someone is speakijg right next to you when they are miles away, being awed by nature and having that realisation that the fox fur coveted back in 30s Austria actually comes from a fox. Yet, Ritter also appreciates the beauty of the landscape: the colours of the sky reflecting on the ice, the Northern lights, the mysterious beauty of the distant, snow-covered mountains and fjords, the moonlight and clear air. Northern lights of incredible intensity stream over the sky; their bright rays, shooting downward, looks like gleaming rods of glass. They are hundreds of miles from civilization and their closest neighbor is a man living in a similar hut 60 miles away.

Weird things happen – voices and other sounds travel miles across the still ice and Christiane is surprised to recognise one of her own old bedcovers, trapped in the ice having been used as a sail before she got there. The cookie is set by Facebook to show relevant advertisments to the users and measure and improve the advertisements. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content", but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.Pushkin Press reissued the English text in 2019 with a foreword by Sara Wheeler, a few period photographs and a hand-drawn map by Neil Gower.

It was such a peaceful read, it acted as a balm, although it did not leave me wishing to experience it for myself.Yet A Woman in the Polar Night enchanted me completely, giving me shivers and taking my breath away. Perhaps in centuries to come men will go to the Arctic as in biblical times they withdrew to the desert, to find the truth again. She seems happy to act as a housewife to the two hunters, her husband and Karl, and celebrates their courage and manliness. one’s entire consciousness penetrated by the brightness; it is as though we were being drawn into the moon itself.

This book was one of my favourite reads in 2020, but of course I love everything arctic, and especially reading about the women that went there before me. I also found the philosophical moments she had, utterly meaningless and frankly incredibly boring to read. It also pained me that they felt there was absolutely no wrongdoing in going to that part of the world for absoultely no reason, other than their own self exploration and to kill innocent wildlife. Pretty much everyone she knew advised her against going, but her own expectations were perhaps a bit. 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.

She would refer to people as 'men' on almost every page, refer to herself as the housewife and at one point 'himself' (whaaaat? Ritter is an artist who paints glorious and timeless pictures with her powerful ability to describe scene after scene with polished, refined, yet light and simple words. It took a while for me to get in to this book but as soon as the woman arrived in the polar night I found it hard to put down and the last couple of chapters left a lump in my throat. Velmi zaujímavý je aj doslov prekladatelky Violy Somogyi, v ktorom sa podrobnejšie píše o živote jej aj jej manžela - a že sú to zaujímavé osudy. My only regret is that I wish there were photographs included in the edition from the 1950s that I read.