Beautifully written, poetic prose from an author who is completely in love with Greenland and the arctic ( )

Greenland.

She doesn't live in Greenland, but clearly has spent considerable time there over many years, and eaten a great deal of raw seal while crouched in the lee of a glacier, which is good enough for me.

Ehrlich's account of her multiple trips to Greenland is a bit like hallucinatory/incantatory Annie Dillard (e.g., Holy the Firm) crossed with Jon Krakauer and dusted with cocaine. Her account is sometimes lyrical and sometimes approaches word salad with associations that are difficult to follow. Most of the time, though, her train of thought can be tracked, if not anticipated, and she evokes Greenland's climate so effectively that I was shivering while I read this on Oahu.

Ehrlich has made numerous long visits to Greenland and has become familiar with the land and the people, forging enduring and deep relationships. She is a motherlode of facts and brings in other travelers' narratives (and long glosses of these in some cases, such as Rockwell Kent). As some reviewers have noted (e.g., in discussing A Match to the Heart), she makes some jarring factual errors that should have been caught by an editor. For example, she asserts, "The glacier-carved seabed was 1,000 kilometers deep" (p. 81). This is 1,000,000 meters. Since the Marianas Trench, the lowest point on the globe, is about 11,000 meters deep, Ehrlich probably meant "meters." Because Ehrlich is working in the nature/travel genres as well as the ecstatic/poetic, errors of this sort are all the more jolting.

I enjoyed Ehrlich's reports and musings despite some repetition borne of not revising and harmonizing segments that were first published elsewhere. She has had some magnificent adventures. I'd have liked to know more about her relationships and what her journeys meant to her personally. Though she names emotions, the text comes off as quite distanced and cerebral.

At the same time as I enjoyed the narrative, I was troubled by some of Ehrlich's behaviors and risks that seem foolhardy. These are foregrounded by the history of cold-weather exploration and sport, where small preparatory omissions and lack of planning have destroyed entire teams and expeditions. In one instance, her luggage is lost and she is wearing inadequate clothing. It appears that she simply ignores this rather than borrowing or buying, say, a good coat. This seems counterphobic, negligent, impulsive, or all three. Chris McCandless, the subject of Krakauer's Into the Wild, was soundly excoriated for much less. The difference is that he died and Ehrlich has not. That's a thin line, and I do wish she'd take better care of herself.
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Ehrlich spends seven years in Greenland. This book recounts her time there, living among Greenlanders and encountering the Inuits. Transportation was often by dogsled. She also takes time to share the story of Rasmussen, an early Danish explorer of arctic regions, including Greenland and Alaska. I expected more of a travelogue, and what the book offered was more of a cultural anthropology of Greenland's icier somewhat habitable regions. It did provide a good sense of the place. I found parts of the narrative more interesting than others and think that the book could have been 75 to 100 pages shorter, condensing those portions in which there was little action or which a lot of things that happened earlier recurred. ( )

I first became familiar with Gretel Ehrlich, one of my favorite authors, years ago when I read The Solace of Open Spaces, essays based on her experiences in my part of the country. This book is a series of essays of seven seasons Ehrlich spent in Greenland, interrupted from time to time with historical accounts of Knud Rasmussen's extensive travels in the Arctic in the early 1900's. She writes beautifully and always evokes a sense of place. If you are interested in the Arctic and the life of native Eskimo people, this is a wonderful introduction to the subject and to the extensive first-hand accounts of people who have written about it. Apart from Barry Lopez, no one writes with more authority about the country she travels in than Ehrlich. ( )

Ehrlich's pseudo-poetic nattering about the effects of perpetual darkness on the inner eye almost made me stop reading. I'm glad I stuck with it. By the time Ehrlich is dog sledding with seal hunters on Greenland's polar ice cap, her writing has evened out and the book becomes fascinating. Chapters alternate between the author's own adventures and the history of several Inuit-led exploratory missions across Greenland, Alaska and Arctic Canada. This is more than just a personal travelogue; each page is brimming over with Inuit folklore and customs and Ehrlich takes great pains to explain how every aspect of Inuit culture is essential to survival in an unforgiving climate. This is one of the most informative books I've ever read and I definitely plan to keep it on the shelves of my personal library. ( )