A Woman in the Polar Night

Product Information

In Anbetracht der Erstveröffentlichung und der davor angetretenen Reise muss man den Mut der Autorin anerkennen.

It has since become a classic of travel writing, never going out of print in German and being translated into seven other languages. No electricity, no facilities, no running water, nothing but a tiny stove to heat the tiny hut which was barely a bunk’s length wide and which would mostly be completely immersed in snow. I would love to go to Antarctica but as it would be as a tourist, I’d really worry now about the carbon footprint etc and I don’t think I’d do it. A Woman In The Polar Night is a fascinating memoir, one woman against and with nature, in an extremely inhospitable landscape takes a journey of self discovery.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. 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. Sexism - okay so it was written in the 1930s blah blah blah, I can still be fuming about the clear mistreatment of women. 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.

Christiane envisions being curled up next to a fire, reading, and relaxing for twelve months but when she arrives she is shocked how desolate the landscape is and how spartan her living conditions will be.The people on the ship Christiane sails to to meet Hermann on the Arctic island can't believe she's going to attempt this, and try to talk her out of it. I didn’t understand why they were there in the first place and I felt that that made it hard to get invested in the story because it all felt a bit pointless. A dear friend of mine saw that I was reading quite a few memoirs of people living in Alaska, far removed from modern civilization, and she suggested I read this book. A snow storm came up, and she spent those days shoveling snow just to be able to get in and out of her hut and to prevent being buried.