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The Greenlanders

Jane Smiley (Goodreads Author)

3.89 · Rating details · 2,456 ratings · 368 reviews

Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas. Set in the fourteenth century in Europe’s most far-flung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains, The Greenlanders is the story of one family–proud landowner Asgeir Gunna ...more

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Paperback, 608 pages

Published September 13th 2005 by Anchor (first published March 12th 1988)

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May 25, 2012 Alesa rated it it was amazing

You don't just read this book. You LIVE it. Who would have thought that the lives of Scandinavian settlers in medieval Greenland could be so fascinating. Life was so hard and brutal. Both the culture and the climate were totally unforgiving. But it's fascinating to see how our forebearers lived, and how much of stoic Scandinavian culture remains in families of that heritage today.

The author, Jane Smiley, is an author of stunning brilliance. She carries you to another time and place, such that yo ...more

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Dec 14, 2011 Chrissie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Chrissie by: Maudie

Shelves: sample-ok, kindle, hf, 2012-read, greenland

I recommend this book to those of you seeking immersion into the world of medieval Greenland. The characters are the Nordic immigrants who settled in Greenland, the events taking place in the 1300s, centuries after Viking exploration. These people must cope with cold and a native population that is so strange that these creatures are seen as demons. These people, the indigenous Inuits, are called skraelings. It is a world of hunger and hard times, adultery and murder, illness and death and lawle I recommend this book to those of you seeking immersion into the world of medieval Greenland. The characters are the Nordic immigrants who settled in Greenland, the events taking place in the 1300s, centuries after Viking exploration. These people must cope with cold and a native population that is so strange that these creatures are seen as demons. These people, the indigenous Inuits, are called skraelings. It is a world of hunger and hard times, adultery and murder, illness and death and lawlessness. Death, death and more death….. and of course religion. The Norwegians settled here to trade, to hunt and to farm. The Thing and the Bishop and his priests were the ultimate authority of power, and it isn’t easy reading of their ways.

I have never run into the style of writing found in this book. To help you determine if you will enjoy it, I have included a quote:

Then she turned to Gunnar and declared that as a child of but fifteen years, Gunhild could not be asked to keep two things in her mind at once, namely the Thjodhilds Stead way and the Lavrans Stead way. And since one had to make way for the other, it was necessary that the old go out and the new come in. The result of this was that on the feast of St. Stephen, Gunhild and Gunnar went on skis across the fjord and over the hills to Thjodhilds Stead, and Gunhild stayed there, as a maiden, and came home no more. And this was also the case, that in the disorder of departure, she never once looked over her shoulder, nor did she see her brother and sisters and mother waving aéfter her, but she only went forward, looking for her new home, and this came to Birgitta as an unaccountable grief, no matter how she prayed and told herself that this was the pain of bearing daughters, and folk must always accustom themselves to it. (41%)

The language is different. There is an absence of dialog. There is a distance between the “storyteller” and the listener. There is a formality to expressions that reflects the atmosphere of the times. The reader is always looking on rather than partaking of the events. Nevertheless, as the story proceeds you very definitely come to care for the characters. When you read the above quote you feel the sorrow and grief of the mother who is losing her child – even though she reasons with herself that this is a step all mothers must take.

Although the events are tragic, there are also characters that are happy and satisfied with their lives. There are characters that will astound you with their strength, others with their individuality. There are couples that separate and take other spouses or women who manage alone. That is no small task. There is feuding and injustice and then there is kindness. There are neighbors who step in and help when they need not.

You will feel immersed in another world. You will understand what their life really was like. Mostly it was grim. You see their world with their eyes and their sensibilities. You come to understand how the skraelings could be dangerous; how the priests were worthy of respect and that sometimes one simply had to see that people were punished. I f you didn’t see this was done yourself, nobody else would. The Pulitzer prize-winning author, Jane Smiley, plops you down in another world where the mindset is initially completely foreign and strange. You come to think as they do. However, the book will not fit everyone. The writing takes getting use to and the characters are numerous. They are listed in the front. Don’t expect a lot of laughs. Do expect total immersion in another time and place.

In my view this book deserves five stars for the author’s ability to transport the reader to a completely foreign place and for that place to become real. I have chosen nevertheless to give it three stars because I personally had a hard time with the language style, even though it had to be exactly as it was to properly conjure that world. I did have trouble reading this book; I can only give it three stars.
...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Roaldeuller rated it it was amazing

Note: this is a personal and somewhat rambling review.

The Greenlanders was one of the great reading experiences of my adult life, and I have to confess that "great" reading experiences have become few and far between the older and more jaded I get. I had heard of the book for several years prior, and I knew that at some point, the time would ripe. I find that certain books reward a structured, self conscious approach to being read, The Greenlanders being a case in point. I am not sure why, it ce Note: this is a personal and somewhat rambling review.

The Greenlanders was one of the great reading experiences of my adult life, and I have to confess that "great" reading experiences have become few and far between the older and more jaded I get. I had heard of the book for several years prior, and I knew that at some point, the time would ripe. I find that certain books reward a structured, self conscious approach to being read, The Greenlanders being a case in point. I am not sure why, it certainly isn't rational (another example was Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose). Most books I pick up and start reading immediately, but for certain others, I feel the need to anticipate and postpone.

In this instance, I purchased a used hardback through an Amazon partner. When it arrived it was pleasingly large and heavy with a clear plastic cover protecting the jacket. The cover artwork is excellent, and the bookseller had included an additional bonus of a postcard version of the cover (or perhaps this was included by the publisher - in any case it made a great bookmark!) I set the book aside for several weeks on my bedside table to let the idea of it grow in my mind, occasionally picking it up just to enjoy the heft, and eventually, the time was right and I dove in.

When I did start to read it I was immediately captivated. It is not an easy read as some reviewers have pointed out. The prose style is that of an actual Norse or Scandinavian saga, the dialog can seem stilted, and the overall tone is stylized, spare, and stark. Smiley frequently reuses certain phrases - "there came a time" for example - reinforcing the sense that one is listening to an oral story. The characters can be difficult to keep track of. Simple events (harvests, meals) are described with the same dispassionate tone as murder. If you read quickly or skim at all, you can miss vital developments.

Despite its challenges, The Greenlanders richly rewards a reader's efforts. After the first few pages, I had sunk into it's mood, my inner ear adapting to the pacing and style of the prose, surrendering to the almost Biblical voice. I have a similar reaction to Shakespeare or Melville - difficult at first, but then as I get accustomed to the rhythm, it is as though I enter a different world. So as to not spoil the plot, I will say only that the story is truly epic in scope, covering decades and taking the character(s) from youth to old age. By the time I was finished, after several late nights of reading, I felt as though I were emerging from a dream. Images from the book remain with me, still vivid in my brain a year later.

I am generally a fan of Jane Smiley, although I must admit that I prefer her less popular books (Moo, Horse Heaven) to her blockbusters (Thousand Acres). The Greenlanders definitely falls among the former. Highly recommended. ...more

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Feb 16, 2021 nastyako rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: best-of-2021, faves, historical-fiction, nordic

I've never read anything like this novel even though I've read other epics and medieval norse sagas. This book is only 600 pages long but I'd been reading it for 2 month. This is a slow book, but you wouldn't want to rush it anyway, it is packed with a lot of stories and also it has this detached style of writing as is common in norse sagas. You are never in the heads of our protagonists, you are watching them from afar. But this works brilliantly for the scope and scale of it. We have dozens of ...more

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Aug 18, 2007 Meg rated it really liked it

What makes this book unique is also what makes it unapproachable: Namely, it was written in the style of a Scandinavian epic, which is a departure from the narrative graces we're used to. At first, this causes it to seem anecdotal and choppy, and I had a hard time getting into it. After I became immersed in the characters and their lives, however, it quickly gathered momentum and drew me in. Though it follows a large cast of characters, I did not find myself yearning for more attention to some a ...more

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Nov 24, 2018 Terry rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, that-northern-thing, favorites

Wow. I picked this up on something of a whim with one or two reservations (as my GR friend Richard has opined it’s a “stonking wodge of paper” and I didn’t know if the book would hold my interest for the page count), but boy am I glad I tried it. This is an incredible book. Not just because of the great amount of research that I imagine was involved in its creation, but quite simply because it tells a compelling story (or really an interrelated set of stories) that is immersive and vivid. Based Wow. I picked this up on something of a whim with one or two reservations (as my GR friend Richard has opined it’s a “stonking wodge of paper” and I didn’t know if the book would hold my interest for the page count), but boy am I glad I tried it. This is an incredible book. Not just because of the great amount of research that I imagine was involved in its creation, but quite simply because it tells a compelling story (or really an interrelated set of stories) that is immersive and vivid. Based on the Icelandic Family Sagas, and written very much in their style, it may take the modern reader a bit of time to acclimate themselves (there are, for example some abrupt changes of scene, or even the casual mention of the death of a character we have been following, as well as the generally laconic style that is often found in the source material), but Smiley does an excellent job in capturing the cadence and voice of the sagas while managing to add just enough ‘novelistic’ detail on the thoughts and actions of her characters to help to fill out the lacunae that might otherwise be found in a more traditional saga. She has, in short, an unerring talent at being able to “see the bones of the story and then to apply muscles and skin to it” as my afore-mentioned friend Richard has so astutely pointed out. She was no doubt aided by the fact that the Icelandic sagas are already known as a literature that appears incredibly modern to contemporary eyes despite their medieval provenance with their focus, partially at least, on the daily lives of ‘normal’ people.

As is perhaps obvious from the title, Smiley takes as her subject the lives of the Norwegian and Icelandic settlers of Greenland and their struggles to survive the trials imposed upon them by both the harsh environment in which they live, as well as human opposition (of both the ‘skraelings’, or native inhabitants of the island, not to mention the perhaps more prevalent and dangerous existence of their own poor decisions and internal conflicts). It is a fascinating postulation of the daily (and especially seasonal) lives of ‘normal’ Greenlanders centering on the family of Asgeir Gunnarsson, with special emphasis on his son Gunnar, daughter Margaret, and subsequent grandchildren. Underlying the tales of daily life that follow, and informing all that happens, is the enmity that lies between this family and their local rivals, and the intertwined tragedies that shape their lives as a result. This is not to say that the lives of others, including the putative leaders of the Greenlanders, are not also taken into account, but it could be argued that the relative poverty of all of the Greenland settlers, especially as time wore on and the tenuous sea connection to the rest of Europe all but disappeared, made the distinction between great and low somewhat less noticeable.

The story makes explicit the casual cruelty of which humans are capable. All of the characters suffer due to the harsh realities of their world, and all too often because of the enmity or carelessness of others, but I must say that poor Margaret Asgeirssdottir suffers so continuously and tragically that you’d have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by her life even though told in the matter-of-fact manner of the sagas. It sometimes seems as though the very understated nature of Smiley’s delivery of these events paradoxically makes them resound all the more fiercely in the reader’s mind. For all of the harsh realities and tragic events that occur, however, this isn’t misery porn and the book is often leavened by humour and scenes of love, compassion, and insight.

Smiley’s most exceptional achievement perhaps lies in the development of her characters. I found that all of them became very real to me in short order as I followed them through the years and the vagaries of life in Greenland which affected and changed them. It was really a uniquely moving experience. I was certainly most interested in the lives of the main family that came to centre around Gunnar Asgeirsson, his wife Birgitta, sister Margaret and their children, but really all of the characters whose lives we glimpse in the novel are fascinating and real. It seemed as though I had spent this time with them myself, growing and changing as they did, and I came to feel the victories they had won (few though they may be) and the losses that they had endured were things in which I had also shared. I was, for example, struck by my feelings for Kollgrim Gunnarsson as he grew into manhood and moved towards his inevitable fate even though as a child he was not an especially sympathetic character. Indeed I began to see much of his father in the boy and then found myself almost surprised to consider the elderly Gunnar Asgeirsson, wondering how he had himself so quickly grown from the wayward boy I remembered into a man, much as I might have felt regarding a friend from my youth, or a child I had remembered whom I now saw before me as a grown adult. It is quite a magical feeling of inclusion that the reader (this one at least) feels among these characters.

I highly recommend this book so that you can experience the harsh, but full lives of the Greenlanders as Smiley portrays them and be moved by the wonders and horror of human nature. Humanity with all of its magnificent and ridiculous foibles is on full display. ...more

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Jan 18, 2015 Christopher Howard rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

My favorite books are the books that I read at the right time. Do those things happen or do we make them happen in our minds? Bitin off more than I can chew about this and that and Beowulf and Salomé and then someone inserts Icelandic sagas and Christian influences–thanks for trying to make some sense of what I'm attempting to say–and then I go off talking about that and then someone says no, Catholic influences and Tolkein and the Apocrypha and hey, are you going to Easter Mass? Well–there's a ...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, greenland, literary-fiction, 4-stars-and-a-half, family-saga, best-10-books-read-in-2010

The Greenlanders is an exceptionally well-written bit of historical fiction, detailing the little-known history of the Norse settlement in Greenland from the mid-14th to early-15th century. While the story focuses primarily on one family, there is no real protagonist, and the narrative slips in and out of the lives of many members of the small community.

Smiley consciously adopts the style of an oral epic, paying attention to the rhythm of the prose and repeating certain phrases ("It was the cas The Greenlanders is an exceptionally well-written bit of historical fiction, detailing the little-known history of the Norse settlement in Greenland from the mid-14th to early-15th century. While the story focuses primarily on one family, there is no real protagonist, and the narrative slips in and out of the lives of many members of the small community.

Smiley consciously adopts the style of an oral epic, paying attention to the rhythm of the prose and repeating certain phrases ("It was the case that. . . ."). But there are other consequences of this style as well: there's a certain emotional distance from all the characters, who play their roles in the story but let little of their personalities or emotions shine through, compared to characters in most modern novels. There's also a certain lack of explanations and description, which, while I understand that it was a deliberate choice, bothered me somewhat: it's another way of keeping the reader at a distance.

Which isn't to say that this isn't an enjoyable or absorbing book, by any means. I wouldn't call it a "page-turner," but still didn't want to put it down once I got into it. Not surprisingly, a lot happens in the book, with major events often treated with great detachment, as there's just so much to get through. Memory and the passage of time are dealt with quite a bit; we see events that happened early in the book become legends, while other early events are forgotten about completely and disbelieved when someone mentions them half a century later. We're also witnesses to the slow decline of the Greenlander civilization: before the beginning of the book, one of the two settlements has already been abandoned, and the Greenlanders fold in on themselves more and more as time progresses. Their detachment from European civilization, and the little that we do hear about Europe in the book, provide an interesting backdrop to their daily struggles.

As a literary book, I suppose this one is meant to be able to be interpreted in many different ways, and it's interesting to see how other people here have interpreted it quite differently from me: for instance, I saw the native population as being quite minor and Smiley as deliberately downplaying their role. The "skraelings" remain an enigma, with characters telling us about them far more than we actually see them.

At any rate, I found this to be an admirable book, although I'd advise people to read the preview before ordering it, as it's not for everyone. I round down to four stars not because I found the book to be flawed, but because I found the level of detachment to be a bit much. I understand that the Greenlanders expressed very little, and that they would have found no need to explain things about their culture when they didn't realize that things could be any other way; but the book was neither narrated by, written by or written for ancient Greenlanders, and this kept the book from being as memorable as it otherwise might have been. Still, overall an excellent piece of literature. ...more

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Feb 10, 2008 samantha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-lit

I really don't even remember when I read this book... that said, it was one of the most beautiful books I've read. Jane Smiley is an expert in Icelandic literature and sagas, which I know she once taught at University of Iowa (she may still). She chooses to use the prose style of these epic sagas to write her own saga of 14th c Vikings attempting to colonize Greenland. This makes it a bit difficult to get into right at first, but just like with any writing style, you quickly adjust. Just give it ...more

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Jan 04, 2009 Bettie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, plague-disease, colonial-overlords, environmental-issues, epic-proportions, medieval5c-16c, paper-read, one-penny-wonder, families, ghosties-ghoulies

This is a convincing and masterly fictional account about eking out a life on mediaeval Greenland. If you prefer non-fiction then Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is your best source.

As with Sigrid Undset's 'Kristin Lavransdatter' trilogy, 'Greenlanders' is written in oral-epic-saga mode so it didn't surprise me at all to find a character called Birgitter Lavransdottir (hattip?). Now for the *gasp* statement - I am already (100 pages in) enjoying this more than the eternal hanky ...more

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Jul 23, 2019 Aubrey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reality-check, antidote-think-twice-all, 5-star, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, r-2019, reviewed, antidote-think-twice-read, 1-read-on-hand, r-goodreads

4.5/5

"There is no place for anger in a good wife."
"Then indeed, there is no place for honor or virtue, it seems to me.["]

This is not a work whose worth lends itself well to being expressed through quotes and other breeds of pithy summations. To put it colloquially, this is the kind of writing that evokes such swells of emotion that GoT and co. ape at: a never ending pall of threat of death and worse by the wildest and most inexplicable means and striking down all and sundry, driving religion, driving culture, driving literature and fate, until what is left is little more than the dire inheritance of melancholy that often expresses itself as various "mental illnesses" amongst Nordic descendants. Reading this, I began to understand the terror that births murderous superstition, as the good were drowned in the whimsy of the powerful and the hallucinating starvation over the denial of bigotry. This is no gore porn, but the bane of reality scrambling for a handhold, any handhold, on the surface of a civilization slowly sinking under the weight of famine, disease, war, and death, never cheaply expressed as 'the four horseman' and all the more deeply felt for it. To fight against it would be to rage against history itself, and instead we must sit and consider our comparative wealth against our comparative imprisonment, neither needing to hunt for our own food, build our own villages, deliver our own children, nor, in most cases, being allowed to do so, and, in some vital ways, suffering all the more for it.

This book is no Memoirs of Hadrian or A Place of Greater Safety in terms of linguistic fireworks and other experimental measures, but somehow, between the descriptions of mundane chores and tragic accidents and exterior states sporadically, briefly, and yet brilliantly expressed in bursts of narrative and song and self-harm, it manages to convey the typhoon of human feelings circumscribed by the best tragedies and histories of the stage. It's hard at times to keep track of everyone, patronyms and all, especially for one such as me who never really bothers to put names together with personalities unless there's an especially good reason to do so, but fortunately, the narrative often gave me very good reasons in its masterful balance of free indirect speech between various individuals and the collective consciousness of a community communing with its cultures. There are main characters, but their lives serve as much as a convenient book-ending of beginning and end as they do a narrative focus, and the fact that the story keeps coming back to them seems as much due to the luck that accompanies calm and careful excavation of a village, long buried after a long ago abandonment and near forgotten by modern mythos of how humanity came to be. I can understand why Vollmann cited this as inspiration, and while I don't feel the need to return to that author just yet, I am grateful for the degree of joining that led me to this work. It clarifies Smiley's winning of the Pulitzer Prize for me, although I have little interest in pursuing her work that was awarded such, , for my heart belongs more to the North than it does to Shakespeare, so I'd rather first read through The Sagas of the Icelanders before I take on a piece of fanfiction constructed around the hubris of King Lear.

I really was not expecting this book to be as good as it ended up being, and it just goes to show what a pleasure it is to be mistaken in one's assumptions at times. It makes me especially keen on pursuing King Hereafter, another piece of historical fiction that I've been eyeing for some time, but that's another beast of a book, and I want to do some clearing off of the other two 500+ pagers on my currently reading docket before I pile on another. I could be convinced of reading more of Smiley's work, but the whole farming vibe I get from her really doesn't appeal unless it's placed 600 years in the past and a significant number of latitudes north. Not that I'm looking for a sequel to this or anything, but I do love fiction that demonstrates the subterranean strains of nobility, evil, love, and obstinacy that drives human beings to the brink and back again, and it's easier to achieve such pathos way back when and further on out. Much has changed in the age of the Internet, and yet there is something lacking in this seeming stability of ours where the prophets have been replaced by climatologists and the fire and brimstone has come to literally await even the most staunch of atheists directly on the mortal plain. Smiley doesn't have the answers, but my god can she tell a story.

"[I]t seems to me that folk wish only one thing above all, and that is to have goods for themselves, to hold and to keep, and then they are surprised at the cost of these goods, for this cost is either almost more than they can pay, or more than they can pay."

...more

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Nov 17, 2007 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own, historical-fiction, scandinavian-authors, all-timefavorites

What a truly amazing book. Written in a style reminiscent of the Norse sagas, beautifully detailed and epic in scale, this is the only book I've ever found that captures what it must have been like to live in one of the farflung Viking colonies of the Middle Ages. Greenland is a terribly inhospitable place, but I had no idea how inhospitable before I read this. They were completely unable to cultivate any fruits or vegetables or wheat. Their diet consisted of meat, from both wild and domesticate ...more

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May 04, 2016 Chavelli Sulikowska rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites, five-star

I ploughed through this epic family saga with something akin to the force with which the Greenlanders forge through snow in hunt of a she bear - testamony to Smiley's skill as an enthralling and compelling story teller. All immersing, I lived every pastoral upheaval, shivered every winter famine and rejoiced at every successful birth with the captivating characters. Raw and brutal, a true tale of human resilience and not for the faint hearted. The Greenlanders is an exceptionally rewarding and t ...more

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Dec 23, 2012 Jack Massa rated it liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction

You think you got problems? Try living in Norse Greenland in the Little Ice Age. If you don't kill enough seals at the autumn hunt, you and your family might starve over the winter. That is if you don't die of the "vomiting ill" or get axe-murdered by a neighbor over some stupid feud. Geez.

This prodigious novel reads sometimes like a fantasy, the culture and everyday lives of the people being so strange. And at times like a "lost colony" SF novel, the community so isolated that a ship from Europ ...more

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Oct 09, 2011 Anna rated it really liked it

Shelves: to-2011

Although I struggled to stick with this book in the first 100+ pages, but I had read really good reviews on it so I stuck with it. Soon I was hooked and I am glad I did. The most interesting aspect of this story was the influence the Greenland's relative isolation had on their morals and religious beliefs. The oral preservation of laws that tried to maintain their original ties to other norther countries maintained some continuity until lawspeaker Bjorn failed to pass them on and even failed. As ...more

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Dec 17, 2009 Mia rated it it was amazing

I loved this book--really, really loved it, didn't want it to end. Since I can't abide Jane Smiley's other books* I couldn't figure how I would so love one but so hate the others. I was literally afraid to read it again, fearing that I might notice on the second reading loathesome qualities I'd missed the first time around, that I'd read shallowly and under the influence of my love for Sigrid Undsett's Kristen Lavransdatter, which I also adored.

But after years and years of this wondering and wo ...more

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May 13, 2012 Elizabeth Urello rated it it was amazing

Shelves: novels

I loved this book so much! As with all books I really love, I can't say exactly why it was so absorbing. A lot happens, but not in a page-turning way, it's not funny at all, and while you do come to know and care about the characters, they are held at a certain remove from the reader. But it's nearly 600 pages of awesomeness about a lost society I'd never had any interest in before, and I loved every word of it. It's about endurance and survival in a hostile landscape, in which human emotions - ...more

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Apr 18, 2014 Rosamund rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-2016, scandinavia-nordic

Can't help wondering whether those giving high ratings are simply scared to undermine all the massive amounts of research that must have gone into this. I can totally imagine it being some people's thing, of course, but it's just so... slow. Not a shred of gratification anywhere. From a writer's perspective it's a commendable feat, but it's not readable.

It does have bursts of humour in places where you'd least expect it:

'When she passed a birch tree, she said, "Little birch tree, little birch t ...more

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Jun 07, 2011 Diana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-fiction, historical-fiction

This is very different from the other Jane Smiley books I've read. I'm knocked out that she can write in such different styles, and I loved this book.

Norse people settled on Greenland for about four hundred years, until the Little Ice Age made it impossible for them to survive there in about 1400. I was surprised when, about a hundred pages in, I found myself getting completely absorbed in this book and its world. It's told in what can seem like a kind of flat style, maybe like Saga stories from ...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Melissa rated it liked it

I really wanted to like this book, to continue my months long delve into medieval historical fiction. I read about fifty pages in and could not take it any more. This book is very dry. It reads like an account from a very boring town gossip (this person was the son of this person, went to this persons farm, did this, the other person said this, years later this happened, blah blah blah). Fifty pages in and one of the "major" characters (according to the back of the book) dies, and I couldn't car ...more

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Jan 08, 2011 Sarah rated it did not like it

Shelves: fiction, unfinished

I really really wanted to read this book - I generally like Jane Smiley's work, and its historical fiction! About Northern Europe no less!

But in the end it was just...ponderous and dull. And frankly, I couldn't care less about any of the characters - not the unfaithful wife, the family she left behind, the crazy priest...not anyone. They were just all so dull. Even as Smiley so painstakingly - in so much detail - talked about the harshness of their life and their winters I still didn't care.

(a ...more

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Jan 06, 2009 Isis rated it it was ok

I forced myself to plug away at the Norse-epic-style prose (in which paragraphs may be pages long, and dialogue appears only sparsely) by telling myself, hey, it's a deliberate stylistic choice! She's being true to her genre! But in the end, it was a plodding, boring story about only vaguely interesting characters who had the bad habit of randomly dying or being killed just as I started to get interested in them. ...more

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Sep 20, 2011 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

For a modern book, this struck me as a lot like the old icelandic/greenlandic stories that I've read. Of course, that is both good and bad as far as my personal tastes go. I cannot fault the characterization, depth of detail, or scope. However, it just goes on and on and on and on and on. You sometimes see entire lives in a couple of pages, but that's only a tiny portion. It is extremely dense, but I have to wonder if some of that could have been cut. It makes it seem more like the old Norse tal ...more

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Aug 13, 2007 Nicole rated it liked it

How many chances am I going to give Jane Smiley?

I had to drag myself through this 700 page epic about 14th century Norse people in Greenland. The first few hundred pages were utterly confusing - with dozens of significant and insignificant characters (and no way to distinguish the two) with similar names. If I had only kept a cheat sheet, I'd have done a lot better.

There were moments in this rambling book that were really interesting. The story spans generations of an unlucky family and the core ...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Rhian rated it it was amazing

This may be my new favorite novel. It was hard going at first, but Smiley's strange, impersonal way of telling the story really got under my skin. I read it six months ago and it still comes to mind constantly.

What did I like about it? The pared-down world of the Greenlanders, the subtly wrought characters, specific, gorgeous detail, and the emotion, which was somehow both stifled and explosive. There is something incredibly moving about their painful struggle to survive and their ultimate fail ...more

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Dec 05, 2011 kari rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Tedious.
Every winter these people wall their animals in and pretty much themselves also and almost starve to death, every year and then some stuff happens and some other stuff happens, most of which is umimportant and goes nowhere and then they wall up their animals and themselves and almost starve to death again and year after tedious year this is the plot.
Dull.Boring.
(Likely well-researched and the writing is well-done, but still it is dreadfully boring)

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Feb 11, 2018 Vanessa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018-popsugar-reading-challenge, 2018

This may be a weird favorite thing to have to say about a book, but it is what I find myself telling people who ask about it. When the heretofore main characters die, their deaths hardly cause ripples in the story. It’s basically, “dude falls into the fjord, and after his corpus is found, it’s placed in the snow pack to be buried in the spring. Next paragraph. Moving right along”. The implication being, the characters have way bigger things to worry about than mere loss of life of one character. This may be a weird favorite thing to have to say about a book, but it is what I find myself telling people who ask about it. When the heretofore main characters die, their deaths hardly cause ripples in the story. It’s basically, “dude falls into the fjord, and after his corpus is found, it’s placed in the snow pack to be buried in the spring. Next paragraph. Moving right along”. The implication being, the characters have way bigger things to worry about than mere loss of life of one character. I have read that this is written in the style of a Norse epic, but having never read a Norse epic, my closest style comp would be the Bible. I love the effect. The writing style makes everything that happens feel so trivial and common, because everything is stated unemotionally, even down to death. Which, in 14th century Greenland, I’m sure death was trivial and common.

Speaking of my favorite things, I heart the Black Plague. It’s my favorite historical event. I have a t-shirt that says, “Black Plague European Tour 1347-1351” on the front and all its “tour dates” on the back. The book takes place at the same time as the Black Plague, but Greenland is so distant that the Plague doesn’t make it there during the ample period of time covered in this novel (1345ish-1415ish). Occasionally people from Iceland or Norway will show up and be like, “Oh, you guys are lucky to have escaped the Plague” and the Greenlanders are basically, “Great, we’re starving. We can’t grow carbs here. We literally eat reindeer meat sammies where instead of bread there’s seal jerky and instead of lettuce there’s seaweed. Winter lasts nine months. We have no weapons, and the Eskimos who live here are kinda shifty. No trees grow here, meaning we can’t build ships, meaning we can’t leave... OH GOD, TAKE US WITH YOU, TAKE US WHERE THE PLAGUE IS!”

I was lucky enough to get to see Jane Smiley do an author talk when I was about halfway through this book. I got to ask her a question about it, which made my inner nerd very happy. I asked her about her research process for this book. She said she talked to an archaeologist who worked at the site of the Norse settlement on which this book was based, and the archaeologist said the book checks out, historically, plausibility-wise. She said she got to visit the site of the settlement and saw one of the corpses, and referred to bad things having happened to the corpse and her people. She also said she swore off writing something this immersive again because of the effect it had on her. Which made me wonder where the story was going... it’s one thing to have constant, unmourned death, but was she going to kill EVERYONE? Did she go straight Shakespeare in this piece? Suddenly all I wanted to do was google the history of Greenland, but I could not give in because of 600 year old spoilers.

What I will say is this book is about the downfall of a civilization, a gradual yet dramatic devolution. At the beginning, folk taught their sons to read, the Catholic church had a strong foothold, and everybody had some cows. By the end, non-clergy are sainting dead babies, there’s a cult leader doing his own thing with religion and getting followers, and winters have grown too harsh for anything bigger than sheep and goats.

There’s a criminal on the loose for the second half of the book. He goes from steading to steading stealing food, and everyone dreads his coming. No one has adequate weaponry or back-up to kill him. They end up finding his starved corpse. He represents the unstoppable negative forces against the Greenlanders, yet even this monster proves himself human by dying in the same way as so many others do.

A quick word about Settlers of Catan. I couldn’t stop thinking about it while I read this. Okay, there are no bricks or ore or wheat or wood, so I’m sure Catan would be a more habitable of an island, but still. There are sheep and whales and seals and reindeer to trade, and a robber.

In the end, she doesn’t kill everyone, but the characters who are left senses danger and foreboding. One character predicts the end of the settlement in a beautiful way that gave me similar feels to the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “And a dire fate it was, for steadings would be broken up, and horses and byres would fall down, and sheep and cows would be scattered into the wilds, and grass would grow everywhere, and sand would fly in and cover everything, and the people would vanish from the face of the earth, leaving behind themselves only bits of tools and broken toys and shards of bone, and the land would be so accursed that even the accursed skraelings would avoid the place of the Greenlanders.”

2018 popsugar reading challenge prompt: a book with your favorite color in the title. ...more

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Oct 08, 2014 Jennifer Locke rated it really liked it

A fun, breezy summer read!

. . . this is NOT. The Greenlanders is a multi-generational epic told in the Norse style of the old sagas. Read the first few chapters of the Bible if you want to get a feel for Smiley's language. There is murder on the third page of this 584 page tome--told as casually as if a character in a modern story decided to take a drive to the grocery store. That's the first of many, many deaths that befall the Greenlanders: of starvation, exposure, childbirth, etc. The Greenla ...more

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Sep 05, 2017 Caro rated it really liked it

Shelves: vikings

The sad decline of Greenland's eastern settlement features death by starvation, the vomiting ill, being swept into the sea and drowning, falling through the ice and freezing and drowning, murder both justified and not, wasting away due to emotional trauma, and being burned to death for adultery. But the tone and pace are not as intense as you might expect from this account - instead, the tale is told in measured tones with very little reference to feelings, presumably much like the sagas themsel ...more

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Jan 07, 2009 Bibliophile rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, fiction, historical-fiction, scandinavia

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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About Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley

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Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar ...more

Books by Jane Smiley

Some Luck (Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga, #1)

Early Warning (Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga, #2)

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Quotes from The Greenlanders

“Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.” — 4 likes

“And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?” — 2 likes

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