For My Reading Summer of Nordic White Nights I read in July 2015 five more books set in countries with Arctic territories. The contemporary German novel The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny allowed me to accompany a fictionalised version of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin, before meeting the impoverished working-class family from the French-Canadian classic The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy in Montréal in February 1940. Then I time-travelled to the year 1700 to join a poor farmer sentenced to be beheaded in the classical novel Iceland’s Bell by Halldór K. Laxness, the Nobel laureate in literature of 1955. At my next destination, modern-day Greenland, a series of suicides serves as backbone of the Anatomy of a Night by Austro-Korean writer Anna Kim first released in 2012. From there I half rounded the planet for A Wild Sheep Chase in Northern Japan in the late 1970s with Haruki Murakami.
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Beginning with his childhood, The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny, winner of the 1980 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, follows the historically-proven milestones of Sir John Franklin’s career as an explorer and turns him into a fictitious character with an unusual as well as handicapping slowness of body and mind. He begins as a midshipman on an expedition to Australia and fights in the great sea battles of his time at Trafalgar and New Orleans, before he gets it into his head to discover the legendary Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean. In 1848, after two failed expeditions to the Arctic (one on sea and one overland) and the publication of a book, he is finally entrusted with leading his own expedition that turns out to be one into death for him and his entire crew.
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The setting of The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy is a largely French-speaking, working class district of Montréal in Canada after the Great Depression and just a few months after the beginning of World War II. The numerous Lacasse family is hard up with scarcely more to support them than the miserable salary that nineteen-year-old Florentine earns as a waitress. The young girl dreams of a better life and feels that her chance has finally come when the ambitious engineer Jean becomes a regular guest in her diner. She does her best to attract the young man and, in fact, she intrigues him, but he is determined not to get involved into more than an innocent flirt. To help him keep distance to Florentine, he asks his friend Emmanuel, who just joined the army, to come with him and he shows less restraint.
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The protagonist of
Iceland’s Bell by en-NOBEL-ed writer Halldór K. Laxness is a farmer and petty thief by necessity who in 1700 gets caught in the machinery of Danish law in force on the island. First he receives a severe flogging for a lèse-majesté remark thoughtlessly made in the presence of the Danish hangman and then, after a night passed together drinking heavily, he awakes with the hangman lying dead beside him in the stream. Although it may well have been an accident – not even he knows –, he is accused of murder a few days later and sentenced to be beheaded. With the help of a young girl in love with a scholar who recently returned to Copenhagen, he escapes certain death on the scaffold and sets out on a long journey to Denmark to call upon the King for mercy and talk to the girl’s sweetheart.
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At the end of the Nordic summer eleven people who live in the fictitious village Amarâq in Eastern Greenland commit suicide within only a couple of hours. It happens without warning and the Anatomy of a Night by Anna Kim explores the reasons behind these desperate acts ending very different lives – as well as often unnoticed suffering. It's a country full of extremes where unemployment and poverty going hand in hand with alcoholism have reigned ever since the Danish government built the settlement at the back of beyond during a great famine that killed many Inuit. Despite great efforts of the "mother"land, the native Greenlanders never came to feel truly at home in the village and keep being torn between old Inuit traditions and modern Danish culture. Loneliness and disappointed love add to it all.
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The beginning of A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami is as harmless as can be. In December 1977 and May 1978, the narrator receives letters from his friend “Rat” whom he hasn’t seen for ten years and he does him the favours asked in the second letter since they seem easy enough. However, one of the favours – the publication of a black-and-white photo showing a sheep herd – has unexpected consequences because it attracts the attention of the moribund boss of the Japanese shadow powers. The dangerous man wants the sheep with a dark star on its back that he discovered on the photo and menaces the narrator into chasing after it. But first he needs to find “Rat” whom he believes to be hiding away somewhere on the northern island of Hokkaidō
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