A Woman in the Polar Night

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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.

Her transformation from the excitement of arriving on the island, which reads like an Enid Blyton style adventure of the day (1930s), to a fear of what she has let herself in for as the sun goes down in October, not to rise until February, is perfectly described. Ritter lived to be 103 years old, so maybe a year immersed in an Arctic landscape with nothing but nature for companionship is worth consideration after all.Most of the book was about their surviving the long year, and then her writing about the beauty of the place. The conditions were unbelievable in the book – and indeed the relationships – although she’s quite mysterious on her marriage still! I feel the same way, I don’t think I could defend going to Antarctica as a tourist, but I live in hope that one day there will be a strong scientific reason why I do have to go (not very likely but possible).

There are lots and lots of classics of Polar literature of course, but very few of them, and certainly not until very recent times, have been written by women.He is silent on the privations he suffers on hunting trips across the frozen wastes, and she doesn’t ask. She begins to fall in love with the bleak island, even throughout the long, dark night that lasts months.

I intentionally read this slim volume in small sections during quiet morning minutes and reflective evening hours. But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life. I was also amazed by how well she was able to hear and see in the clear air of the Arctic; she could hear the hunters talking even though they were miles away on one of their trips.In the late summer and autumn, Ritter, her husband, and their friend, the hunter Karl, live well, eating eider ducks and duck eggs, seals and foxes they shoot, and wandering on the shore in the beautiful landscape. The author's husband had been living for a few years on the island, hunting and fishing, and had been encouraging her to come spend a year with him. No electricity, no facilities, no running water, nothing but a tiny stove to heat the tiny hut which was barely a bunk’s length wide and which would mostly be completely immersed in snow.