A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (Translator: Jane Degras)

I was directed towards this book in reading Sara Maitland’s marvellous A Book of Silence earlier in the year, though it has taken me a while (as always) to get around to reading it. A Woman in the Polar Night is the self-penned account by Christiane Ritter, an Austrian housewife, of her year spent with her husband and another hunter, Karl, in Spitsbergen (otherwise known as Svalbard) in 1934. They lived for the year in a tiny cabin, no more than ten feet by ten feet in size, in the inhospitable environment on the outcropping called Grey Hook in the extreme North. Ritter left behind her child in order to spend the year with her husband in this uncommon situation. Having a love of all things icy and snowy, a particular affection for stories of endurance and adventure, I was probably a long way towards loving this book even before I started reading. Fortunately for me, it didn’t disappoint.

Ritter is initially breezy about her plans, dismissing the kindly (but interfering) advice of the men on the ship, each of whom expresses discomfort at the idea of her, a woman, living in the Arctic for a year. However, she soon begins to understand what they meant and her first impressions are definitely on the side of less than impressed as she describes:

“Stones, stones. Everywhere sleeping and waking, I see stones. I feel they are becoming an obsession. The stony land, the whole monstrous barrenness, clings to me like a bad dream.

Europe is already left far behind. It seems to me now like a magic land. Flowers and fruits grow out of the earth there. Out of the earth grows what man needs in order to live. Here, where nothing grows, I grasp for the first time the whole tremendous miracle of eternally growing food.

Secretly, though I do not wish to speak of it, I come to believe we shall die of hunger here, or at least of scurvy…”

She openly expresses her shock at the apparently laid back approach of the men, who seem to be assured that they will be able to source plenty of food. Soon, however, she is wolfing down the seal that the men are able to shoot and despite her initial reluctance she learns to accept the hunters life, the sparseness and the strange, bleak lifestyle.

What we see, then, in Ritter is a transformation and it is beautiful. She moves quickly from hating her new environment to a blissful, wondrous love. There is something ecstatic about the way she speaks of her new home, though it is doubtless that she experiences suffering, fear and a test of the limits of her endurance. She becomes lost on the ice, she seeks to protect the Arctic foxes that the men have come to hunt, she hears voices and spends weeks alone in the darkness and violence of an Arctic storm. Despite this, she learns to love and appreciate the beauty of her new, spartan home. As she describes here in what became my favourite chapter, chapter 8 – Peace After the Storm:

“It has become quite clear. A lofty, greenish-blue evening sky arches over the snowy landscape of the fiord. Like a shell opalescing in its own shadowy hues, the earth is floating in transparent space, in which light from distant fountains stirs and floats to and fro. Low on the eastern horizon there is a round, bright pool of light, blueish-pink in colour, the reflection of the sun, now slowly circling the earth far below our horizon. We ourselves live in shadow.

But it is as though things up here have acquired a light of their own, as though they themselves emitted rays of the most beautiful and mysterious hues. All the mountains, tremendous in the foreground and sharply edged in the distance are glassy-bright with rigid ice, glass bright the foreland and glass bright the cliffs along the shore that, transfigured by frost and surf into high, round domes of ice, drop steeply into the sea.[…]

I myself stand forlornly by the water’s edge. The power of this worldwide peace takes hold of me, although my senses are unable to grasp it. And as though I were insubstantial, no longer there, the infinite space penetrates through me and swells out, the surging of the sea passes through my being, and what was once a personal will dissolves like a small cloud against the inflexible cliffs.”

Ritter writes beautifully of a transformative experience with such wonder and ecstasy that I defy anyone not to want to spend a year in the Arctic, in the cold and isolation, after reading this book. What Ritter describes is an experience so awe inspiring and unique that it was life changing, that after her year in the Arctic she was a changed person but changed for the better. She had a new respect for nature, she had a love of quiet and solitude and a changed perception of her old life. As she describes here:

“As we go on with our conversation, we find ourselves pitying all the people in the towns of Europe, particularly the housewives, who besides being worn out by the unending struggle against soot and dust, moths and mice, also feel themselves obliged to keep up appearances. And then we talk about the aesthetic pleasures of Europe, which when we were there seemed so priceless to us – music, for example, that elevates the mind and lightens the heart and without which we could hardly live. Remarkably enough, the hunger for music is quite absent here. Our hearts are light, our minds are in a permanent state of elevation. Nature seems to contain everything that man needs for his equilibrium.”

It is an astonishing book. Written with simplicity and honesty, Ritter is matter of fact about her experience whilst transmitting something of such frail and incomparable beauty that I found myself quite envious of her experience. It is a gripping and mesmerising story, told with wonder and skill. A beautiful read, and one which I’ll return to over and over. A book which deserves to be much more widely known.

A Woman in the Polar Night receives a spellbound 10 out of 10 Biis. 

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer

The Loft is the second book I’ve read by Marlen Haushofer, a largely unknown but brilliant Austrian writer. Haushofer has three books translated to English: The Wall (which I highly recommend), Nowhere Ending Sky (which I’m getting around to) and The Loft. The Wall is a sturdier work, perhaps a more traditional narrative, whereas The Loft leaves a lot more unsaid. Consequently it is more ephemeral, in some respects frustrating, but a highly powered work.

Little happens in The Loft. The story revolves around a week in the life of an unnamed woman and her regular suburban life, her little arguments with her husband Hubert and her curiously distant relationship with her children Ferdinand and Ilse, as well as other peripheral characters. “From our bedroom window we can see a tree that we never seem able to agree about.” the narrator begins, and on this simple detail a stifling, unsettling story unfolds.  It becomes apparent very quickly that there is something not quite right in this little world. Haushofer creates a sense of emotional detachment, that our narrator is simply going through the motions in her daily routine and so are the people around her. That what they are doing are no more than actions, a playing of roles, and that by doing this all participants avoid addressing something true or meaningful between them. The narrator speaks without attachment to any of the members of her family or her acquaintances except, perhaps, when speaking about her dead father-in-law, the original Ferdinand, who seems to be the only person she genuinely cares for. This strange lack of affection seems mirrored in the only activity she undertakes with any seriousness: “My aim is to draw a bird that is not the only bird in the world. By this I mean that anyone looking at it must grasp this fact straight away. To date I have never achieved this and I doubt I ever shall.” It seems that she sees herself as the only bird in the world, and no matter how she tries she shall never feel like she is a part of something. 

The reason for this strange detachment is hidden, though the narrator hints at a lonely childhood and an unsettling event in her own history shortly after Ferdinand was born. At some point she became inexplicably deaf, and because of this deafness her husband Hubert sent her away, to live by herself in the woods with only an unpleasant gamekeeper for company. This terrible event in her history is brought back into focus by the strange delivery of extracts of her diary from that period which appear in her letterbox daily, unsettling her routine. Each day she takes herself to her loft, a place which is her own, and reads these extracts, burning them after reading them in the hope of their destruction. Through her confrontation of her diary entries, coupled with her musings on her day to day life, a palpable sense of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ are created, in which ‘before’ was childlike and suffused with love and ‘after’ was nothing more than dead routine, an empty shell-like existence without meaning or feeling.

Haushofer presents a stifling picture of this woman’s daily existence. Living without sympathy and hiding from a terrible event in her own history which neither she nor those around her can seem to confront. It is hard not to see this story as a metaphor for the annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, during the war, the sense of isolation and ongoing guilt. The sudden, unexpected deafness. the unpleasant gamekeeper and a strange man in the woods who shouts terrible things at her because she can’t hear them. Meanwhile her husband Hubert, her son Ferdinand about whom she seems to care intensely, are left in the clutches of her mother-in-law, a soulless woman who never approved of their marriage (representing Europe, perhaps?). Once you start to see this connection, it crops up everywhere in the little, seemingly unimportant, details of her musings. Like here, when she reflects upon her dark dreams:

“Ten years ago, for example, I dreamed I was in a wide open landscape like a park in which big glass tanks were arranged, full of water. In them say mermaids and mermen playing on harps and flutes. I couldn’t hear through the glass what they were playing but I knew it was the true music, not destined for the human ear. Their scaly tails shone like mother of pearl, and their long flowing hair floated on the surface of the water. They were beautiful. I stood and watched them in breathless rapture, but then suddenly I knew I wasn’t meant to be there with those creatures. It grew dark and a voice said: ‘They have abandoned us; it is the end of the world.’”

Whether or not The Loft is a metaphor for the war, it is an interesting meditation on the strangeness of human existence and the danger of hiding from a truth that seems to define us. At times the narrator can be frustrating, as her avoidance of the truth in her life seems measured and deliberate and it is hard to understand how she can want to live that way. Yet there is a sense that somehow this is the only way that she can live. As she explains: “But what are you to do when you aren’t dead but only dead-apparent? The obvious answer is just to reoccupy the place you left vacant, but this doesn’t really work either.”

Fortunately there remains a sense of redemption, a long slow and painful recovery that is taken in small, almost meaningless steps. And whilst the story is told in a seemingly pedestrian manner, and whilst there is as much time spent hiding from and avoiding the truth as uncovering it, this is a remarkably powerful work that could too easily, on superficial reading, be dismissed as a slow, domestic drama. But it is far more than this, and I find myself impressed (again) by Haushofer’s skill in weaving such an intense and difficult subject-matter into the story of a woman doing her domestic chores and drawing little pictures of birds trying not to seem lonely in a loft.

The Loft receives a drawn-out 9 out of 10 Biis.