Review: "A Woman in the Polar Night" by Christiane Ritter

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
Translated by Jane Degras
First published 1938; reprint published February 2024 via Pushkin Press Classics
★★★★★

What marvellous fun. I've been meaning to read this for years (I love me a good off-into-the-frozen-wilds real-life adventure story), but I'd been putting it off because I'd gotten it in my head that it would be a serious, grim account of survival in those frozen wilds, and instead it's...well, the words that kept coming to mind as I read were things like marvellous, delightful, plucky, and smart.

Ritter was an Austrian painter, and this is her only book—an account of the year she spent with her husband on the island of Spitsbergen, which is far, far, far north in Norway. It was the 1930s, and this was the sort of adventure that was acceptable for men (her husband had been in Norway for several years at that point) but not for women. Pretty much everyone she knew advised her against going, but her own expectations were perhaps a bit...rosy:

The little winter hut appeared to me in a more and more friendly light. As housewife I would not have to accompany him on the dangerous winter excursions. I could stay by the warm stove in the hut, knit socks, paint from the window, read thick books in the remote quiet, and, not least, sleep to my heart's content. (loc. 145)

Her husband writes, devoid of irony:

It won't be too lonely for you because at the northeast corner of the coast, about sixty miles from here, there is another hunter living, an old Swede. We can visit him in the spring when it's light again and the sea and fjords are frozen over. (loc. 153)

And so off to Norway she goes, and is swiftly disabused of her original romantic notions.

I look round for a bed. I am seized by a secret horror of the two bunks with their hard straw mattresses. Who knows what wild hunters last slept there.

"Where is the boudoir you promised me in your letter?" I ask my husband.

"It's not built yet," he replies. "First we have to find planks. The sea sometimes throws them up." (loc. 454)

But for every moment of well-bred horror that she has, she finds many more moments of beauty and awe. There's the fortnight when she's left alone in the hut and the first big storm comes, and she finds herself digging the hut out day after day, hoping that her husband is safe and trying not to think too much about the alternative—and she gets on with it, because what else can she do? There are the mildewed clothes that she finds under a mattress and, after investigating their provenance, chucks into the sea. There are the months of unending darkness, and the weeks when they wait and hope for the ice conditions to change to improve hunting. If she despairs, she rarely lingers in it, and instead dives back into new experiences and new lessons and the beauty of their frozen isolation.

It's worth noting that one of the major points of this Arctic adventure was to trap and hunt for fur—something that has fortunately gone out of fashion. I've been vegetarian since I was four and cannot imagine hunting, especially for something under so much threat as polar bears; the attitudes toward hunting have to be taken within the context of the book's time. But it says something about Ritter's writing that by the end of the book even I (well, part of me) was hoping(!) for a polar bear for Ritter and her husband.

The book has never been out of print in Germany, and someday I'd like to try a reread in the original German. 4.5 stars.

How varied are the experiences one lives through in the Arctic. One can murder and devour, calculate and measure, one can go out of one's mind from loneliness and terror, and one can certainly also go mad with enthusiasm for the all-too-overwhelming beauty. But it is also true that one will never experience in the Arctic anything that one has not oneself brought there. (loc. 1297)

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley. Quotes are from an ARC.