It is as though a current of the most holy and perfect peace were streaming through all the landscape. My copy of the book contains a number of quaint little drawings by Christiane and three neat black and white photos of Christiane and Hermann, the shack in summer, and the shack in winter with just the stove pipe sticking out of the snow. They break out from a tremendous height and seem to be falling directly toward me, growing brighter and clearer, in radiant lilacs, greens, and pinks, swinging and whirling around their own axis in a wild dance that sweeps over the entire sky, and then, in drifting undulating veils, they fade and vanish.

Ich bin so froh, es als Hörbuch genossen zu haben, denn beim Lesen hätte ich bestimmt am Schreibstil zu knabbern gehabt. The descriptive sense of this is simply wonderful, every nuance of the good and the bad is in here and you can see, sense and feel the chilly arctic through the words the author uses. In fact, this book has some similarities with that modus operandi, except Christiane is waiting for her husband in the northern part of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, and the household is a two-room hut, shared by them plus a younger hunter, Karl, that is heated by a broken unreliable stove and buried in snow they have to dig themselves out of half the time, and their dinners are constructed of oats and seal meat. I know we all got a bit concentrated on whether the whale museum in the last book was a hunting museum, but I have to say this is a book with a lot of hunting in it.I also saw that it is the location of the Global Seed Bank, something I have read about with interest over the years.

A snow storm came up, and she spent those days shoveling snow just to be able to get in and out of her hut and to prevent being buried. In Anbetracht der Erstveröffentlichung und der davor angetretenen Reise muss man den Mut der Autorin anerkennen. This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime. There’s even the worry of having a house-arctic-fox around the place, who will eventually be trapped for his fur, however much Christiane tries to save him (because of who I am and who a lot of my readers are, I will say here that he gets through OK). In a tiny hut shared with her husband and a young trapper they endure the cold, hunger and isolation with great love of their little world.

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. Like you, rather less keen on the hunting/trapping stuff, but of course it fits in with the context and the way of life in that region. Pretty much everyone she knew advised her against going, but her own expectations were perhaps a bit. I was fine with it, and also found it odd being there in June when there was almost no night at all, but I don’t think I could live like that.

While the life is harsh and daunting, the author reflects on how a simple life is so much better than the complexity of modernity and on the beauty of the Arctic landscape.But for every moment of well-bred horror that she has, she finds many more moments of beauty and awe. Ein Buch mit faszinierenden literarischen Bildern, allerdings muss ich wieder einmal feststellen, dass solche Reise-/Abenteuerberichte einfach nicht meins sind . And I felt she almost wanted her writing to be so 'beautiful' that she never actually got to the point, it was just descriptive words. Yet, Ritter also appreciates the beauty of the landscape: the colours of the sky reflecting on the ice, the Northern lights, the mysterious beauty of the distant, snow-covered mountains and fjords, the moonlight and clear air.