Review of A Woman in the Polar Night

I'm on Goodreads (Are you?) but I never blog my reviews. I don't know why not. But I love this book. Definitely one of the best and most surprising books I read last year. So I thought I'd splash it in this space, too. I wrote the review mid-read, but I still felt wonderful about it when I finished. In fact, I really really loved the ending. Quiet, deep close to a quiet, deep book. It never went out of print in Germany. I'm on a personal quest to revive stateside interest in it. Read it! Read it!

***

Why had I not heard of this book? I saw it in Tin House, in a feature on forgotten great books, and was skeptical, but got it from the library.

From sentence one, I've been hooked. It's nonfiction, written in the 1950s by an Austrian woman who followed her husband to the Arctic to stay with him in a hunting hut for a year. Her descriptions of travel and the scenery are stunning without being melodramatic. And she's causing me to have the deepest thoughts I've probably ever had on what it means to do housework, to be a housewife, a role she steps into with humor (cleaning bearded seal entrails from your doorstep, anyone?) and a stunning and almost unbelievable acceptance. Don't get me wrong: it's not a book that's ABOUT housewifery (yes, that's a word, says me), but that's what it's causing me to think of: the roles we step into, the roles we want or think we want to step into, and what it means when you strip away absolutely everything else and focus those roles and the attendant relationships down to a 10 X 10 hut in the middle of nowhere.

The writing is gorgeous. (Even my husband, who is the pickiest man alive when it comes to books, read the first few pages (I wouldn't let him have it for longer than that ...) and said it was clearly very good writing and made for good reading.) It feels like it's been awhile since I've had a book I longed for all through the day while I attended to less charming tasks, but this is a book like that. I want to stop people on the street and tell them to read it--it's that good, so far.

Poem for Today, in Regards to Observation as a Form of Prayer

I've been meaning and meaning to post something about blossoms here, but my camera and I are still negotiating the easiest way to get pictures from it to me, so I'm stalled. In the meantime, here's a lovely little one by Mary Oliver which is in regards to summer, not spring, but nevertheless reflects how I feel lately, and how I want to feel. Hat tip to Poetry 180.

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?