Month: February 2025

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter

by

Translated by Jane Degras

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria to join her husband Hermann in Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, which lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It is one of the most northern inhabited places on the planet. Hermann has been spending increasing amounts of time there, hunting and trapping, and as a result has found a new serenity. Christiane is there to stay with him for a year in a tiny hut, the size of a large closet, where they are joined by a young hunter named Karl.

If 1934 makes your ears perk up, you recall that in August 1934 Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency into the title of Führer, thus completing his rise to power. Christiane almost never mentions the politics back home where their democracy is being demolished by a dictator, partly because she is too isolated to hear more than a few random scraps of news, and partly because she is absorbed by her new life. Many of us dream of such isolation these days as our own democracy is attacked.

Before leaving, she imagined she would spend her time there reading books, sleeping a lot, and darning socks. But she quickly learns otherwise. There’s a reason the nearby coasts are called Anxiety Hook, Distress Hook, Misery Bay and Bay of Grief.

The closest neighbor is 60 miles away, and even they are inaccessible in the winter’s depths. She and Hermann have brought some provisions, but mostly rely on what they kill. Her description of preparing her first seal dinner is eye-opening. She is sometimes left alone for days and weeks while the men hunt, and she begins to grasp the “terror of nothingness”  that has driven men—and at least one woman, or so the story goes—mad.

Now everything around us is quite dead; even the battering of the storm has ceased. A heavy mist weighs on everything; the hut is shrouded in stillness and darkness. It seems to me as if only now has the real night fallen, and slowly my courage begins to seep away. Perhaps the sun will never come back again. Perhaps it is dark all over the world.

Yet hard as life in the Arctic is, she finds much to appreciate, especially as an artist.  Describing the early morning, she says, “The whole sky is deep lilac, lightening into a tender cobalt blue at the horizon, over the sea of ice. From the east a pale-yellow brightness spreads, and the frozen sea, reflecting the heavenly colours, shines like an immense opal.” 

In one passage I loved, she compares the twilight at the beginning of the Arctic night with ‘the delicate, wonderful paintings of the Chinese painter—monks, in which the immense and mysterious effect is achieved entirely by gradations from light to dark grey, by forms indicated rather than outlined.’

She finds herself changing. “Why have I been so shaken by the peacefulness of nature?” She even comes to appreciate the isolation.

I am conscious of the immense solitude around me. There is nothing that is like me, no creature in whose aspect I might retain a consciousness of my own self; I feel that the limits of my being are being lost in this all-too-powerful nature, and for the first time I have a sense of the divine gift of companionship.

I appreciate all the details of daily life. Her first responsibility is as a housewife, wrestling with the cracked stove that is their only source of heat, sewing curtains from a scrap of fabric once used as a sail. Nothing is wasted. Driftwood logs are propped against the hut to keep it from being blown away. Paths must be shoveled again every day.

There are gaps in the story. We don’t know why Hermann started spending so much time there, when it seems he and Cristiane have a close relationship. They have a teenaged daughter back in Austria, mentioned once, I believe, but we don’t know how Christiane feels about leaving her for a year. I also wondered how Christiane felt when she learned that Karl would be joining them, though she does show us how grateful she is for his help as the year continues.

The book is written as a journal, mostly in the present tense, so we live through her year of changes with her. I love winter, the cold, and the snow, though I think the hut in Spitsbergen would be beyond even me. I loved the book, though, for its appreciation of the natural world and our place in it, and for the brief escape into a simpler, more rigorous life.

What book have you escaped into recently?

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

by

 

In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meaning into a few pages, and those so clearly written that you almost miss the layers they encompass. I’ll just mention a couple of the stories, and tread lightly so as not to ruin them. As with the best stories, several of them turn on a secret revealed, and I would not spoil your discoveries.

As the title story begins, we are placed in a chapel decorated for a wedding, and a priest ready to officiate. The ceremony itself is dispensed with in a few sentences; the story concerns the immediate aftermath—the photos, the hotel reception, the speeches—as filtered through the priest’s eyes. We do not know his name since he is only referred to as “the priest” or called “Father.” It must be a poignant moment when you lose your identity and begin to be held at arm’s length.

A melancholy air comes forward as the priest locks up the church and heads to the reception. He’d rather walk down by the river, but the hotel is “where his duty lies.” As he walks down the avenue,

On either side, the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Then we are caught up in the whirl of the reception. The scene comes to life through the banter, the details, the people described so acutely. I won’t go on; just know that you are in the hands of a master, and the story will take you to surprising places. The ending is particularly satisfying in the way tiny, almost unnoticed details from the beginning of the story come into play.

The combination of realism and lingering remnants of legends and superstitions are even more central in the last story, “The Night of the Quicken Trees.” That is ancient name for the rowan tree or mountain ash, well known for its magical properties.

Margaret Flusk—”a bold spear of a woman . . .  not yet forty”—moves into an isolated house on the coast in the autumn. The house had belonged to a priest, now dead, and is joined to another house of the same size. It’s inhabited by a forty-nine-year-old bachelor named Stark, who has an odd relationship with his goat Josephine. A blend of comedy, folklore, and the way isolation and loneliness can set a person askew, the story is surprising and inevitable at the same time.

I love the morning when Stack first comes to her door. “Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings.”  Such a great description of someone used to living alone.  

I saw an interview with Keegan in which she said that rather than planning out her stories ahead of time, she lets her main character loose and follows their footsteps. Perhaps that is why we get the sense of discovering the story—and the story behind the story—along with her.

Although these quiet stories speak of lost opportunities, escape, and desire, they are told with “a measured, almost documentary reserve,” as one reviewer put it, which give the reader a little psychological distance, thus enabling us to appreciate the tiny moments that carry considerable meaning, as well as the larger threads of timeless situations and how people survive them.

What short story collection have you come across that entranced you?

The First Ladies, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

by

Benedict and Murray, authors of The Personal Librarian, once again join forces to bring us a well-researched and fascinating story of a friendship that helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt’s work as First Lady of the United States is legendary; less well known is Mary McLeod Bethune’s work, which led to her being called the “First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine.

The daughter of a formerly enslaved couple, Mary Bethune became a fearless and passionate Civil Rights activist. Among her many accomplishments, she founded the American Council of Negro Women, and a private school (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) for Black students in Florida.

The friendship between the two women lasted many years, through the 1920s and 1940s, during which they partnered to push for equal rights. They first connected over a shared commitment to women’s rights and education, which later evolved to include equal rights for people of color. In this story—and this was one of the most interesting parts of the story for me—Eleanor gradually begins to recognise her personal shortcomings and blind spots around race. Their friendship is powerful enough to enable Mary and Eleanor to talk honestly about racial issues, to give and receive advice. And to understand that the work is never done.

The women partnered to work directly—Eleanor trying persuade Franklin to ensure Black citizens reaped the benefit of the New Deal jobs, for example, which led to Mary heading the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration—and indirectly. During a time when even driving in a car together was “not done,” they not only did that, but also met in public, shared a table for  tea in a restaurant, attended each other’s events, etc. By doing so, they changed public perceptions, normalising integration and promoting equality.

Their story is a good reminder that the fight for civil rights in the U.S. began before the 1960s. But the story isn’t all politics. We learn about the family relationships that offer a context for each woman. I found it fascinating to see the ways status and power shifted back and forth between them as the relationship between the two women deepened. As friends and admirers of each other, they rose above such petty concerns. They shared secrets and dreams. They supported each other through disappointments and tragedies.

Readers might be familiar with Eleanor’s struggle with her overbearing mother-in-law Sara and heartbreak over Franklin’s affair with his secretary Lucy Mercer. However, both receive even-handed treatment here, as we see Franklin’s early ideals clashing with the political realities of getting the New Deal laws through, and how Sara’s early support of equal rights for women and people of color influenced Eleanor.

Mary’s handling of daily insults and microaggressions, her insistence that she be addressed as Mrs. Bethune in professional settings rather than by her first name as though she were a servant, are inspiring. When one of her students got appendicitis and was refused treatment at the local hospital, she raised money and founded a hospital for people of color. When her grandson was refused access to a segregated beach, she collected investors and bought a stretch of the beach and waterfront, which they then sold to Black families–and White people were allowed to visit the beach. She invested in Black businesses, including a newspaper and several life insurance companies.

Bear in mind that these two amazing women led active political lives. Historical fiction comes in many flavors, so it’s important to adjust your expectations. I enjoy a light, historical romance as much as anyone else (Georgette Heyer, anyone?), but that is not what we have here. While we do get insight into the personal lives of these two women, for them the personal is political, as the saying goes. Much of the book shows how their personal beliefs and experiences motivate their political work. Thus the pace is sometimes leisurely and the story is rich with historical detail.

I especially appreciated the historical notes from each of the authors at the end, clarifying what came from the historical record and what was added by the authors. I also enjoyed the authors’ discussion of their collaboration. The narrators of the audiobook, Robin Miles and Tavia Gilbert, did an excellent job of bringing this story to life.

Especially in these difficult times, the story of these two women, their courage and commitment, their comradeship and deep friendship, is inspiring.

Who are you turning to for inspiration these days?