In 1934 the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to “read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content”, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realise that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.
At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape, the lack of equipment and supplies… But 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.
This is a book about human resilience, both mental and physical.
A Woman in the Polar Night opens in in late summer. Christiane vaguely packs her warmest winter clothes, thinking about how cosy she will be on Spitsbergen (now known as Svalbard), a Norwegian island far north of mainland Norway. She arrives off the ship in a land of long, light nights.
However, the days rapidly shorten, shadows lengthen and, in mid-October, the sun sets for the last time that year, to rise again the following February. The weeks drag on and Christiane spends days in pitch blackness, conserving fuel to last herself, her husband and his colleague through the winter in their tiny hut.
The conditions she and the men live in are almost impossible to imagine.
Christiane’s vivid descriptions almost make you feel cold reading them: a small wooden hut, with no heating other than a stove, eating almost no vegetables other than potatoes which have been frozen for months, and hunting seals whose meat will provide meals for several weeks. At times one of the men embarks on a journey and there is no way to tell whether they are safe and whether they will return. Every day is a battle to survive.
A Woman in the Polar Night shows not only the extremity of our planet in its far reaches but also the resilience of the human body to be able to live through extreme cold, complete darkness for an extended period of time, an unvaried diet and little or no human contact.
The hope Christiane feels when the sun rises the following spring is palpable.
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