A Woman in the Polar Night in Around the World in 80 Books

Jan 26, 2022 Wendy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, non-fiction, translated, 2022, polar-regions, snow, nature

4.5 stars. Extremely fascinating!

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Aug 20, 2014 Katie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, memoirs, female-author, nature-outdoors, translated

In 1934, Christiane Ritter spent a year living in Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway. A Woman in the Polar Night is her memoir of her time spent there. While on the island, she lives in a tiny hut with her husband and his hunting partner. They have very little in the way of sustenance, relying on very basic staples and any fresh meat they are able to hunt. The island is very desolate and the closest humans are many days journey away.

This book alternated between incredibly terrifying In 1934, Christiane Ritter spent a year living in Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway. A Woman in the Polar Night is her memoir of her time spent there. While on the island, she lives in a tiny hut with her husband and his hunting partner. They have very little in the way of sustenance, relying on very basic staples and any fresh meat they are able to hunt. The island is very desolate and the closest humans are many days journey away.

This book alternated between incredibly terrifying and incredibly awe inspiring. At one point in the beginning of winter, Ritter is alone in the hut while the men are out on a two week hunting expedition. It is the time of year when the polar bears start arriving in the area, so the men leave her a rifle and instruct her to shoot any bears that she may see. While they are gone, the first major snowstorm also hits, leaving her digging herself a path out of the hut each morning. Eventually, the snow rises to the level of the roof, and she writes about taking walks, as she was advised to do every day to stay sane. On these walks, while it is dark outside, as it is all day, she bangs on the roof with a stick to scare off any polar bears that may be hiding in the dark. At times, her descriptions of the isolation and sensory deprivation are completely terrifying and make me wonder how someone can live there and not go crazy. At times she feels like she is going crazy.

Then she writes a beautiful passage describing the spiritual experience of the quiet and the solitude and her feelings of being simultaneously so significant and so insignificant. It makes the vast emptiness of the Arctic sound like the most magical place on earth. Basically all of the descriptions of the world around her were breathtaking: the northern lights, the fjords, the first glimpse of the sun after months of darkness.

I don’t think this book would be everyone’s cup of tea, but it was a really nice book to read on a cold winter night. It makes the darkness seem infinitely magical.
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Jan 12, 2025 Lisa of Hopewell rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2025, audio-books

My Interest
Blogger The Book Jotter writes an excellent weekly round-up post of all things books, reading, publishing and more. It was in one such recent post that I learned of this book, hailed as a “rediscovered classic,” and promoted in a story in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. I saw that a friend had also put it on her TBR in Goodreads, so that all combined to make me want to read it. Happily, it was available as an e-audio from one of the library apps and I downloaded it and started immedi

My Interest
Blogger The Book Jotter writes an excellent weekly round-up post of all things books, reading, publishing and more. It was in one such recent post that I learned of this book, hailed as a “rediscovered classic,” and promoted in a story in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. I saw that a friend had also put it on her TBR in Goodreads, so that all combined to make me want to read it. Happily, it was available as an e-audio from one of the library apps and I downloaded it and started immediately.

The Story
“Northern lights of incredible instensity stream over that sky; their bright rays, shooting downward, look like glaeaming rods of glass. They break out from a tremendous height and seem to be falling directily towar me growing bright and clearer, in radiant lilacs, greens, and pinks….”

“I think the contracts in perception make the same impact on our feelings as weould, for example, the playing of a noisy Berloiz symphony in a theratre where the stage is set in a scene of classic calm.”

[There were too many incredible quotes!]

One of the rare downsides of audio books is you can’t quickly skim the Foreward [written later by another person], so I often skip them. There, I’ve admitted it. So, for this review I went back and borrowed the Kindle version of the book. Austrian Christine Ritter left her child at home in about 1933 and spent a year in a frozen hell-hole with her husband and another man. Or at least she saw it first as a hell-hole. The brutally hard existence (I can’t call it a “life”) with seal and bear meat to sustain their bodies along with whatever meagre supplies they could take along, was truly beyond my ken. Cold as sustaining and uplifting ala Katherine May’s Wintering, was one thing–that was mostly a cold plunge over shortly. This–having to keep digging out the door so that snow didn’t bury their meagre “dwelling,” have live on top of each other in wooden bunks, and having to constantly think of what had to be done next to stay alive was not joyous to me. I missed something?

No matter–this is a book well worth the time. It is very short. 224 pages. I recommend you just read it.

My Verdict
4.0
A Woman in the Polar North by Christine Ritter, translated by Jane Degras
I listened to the audio version of this book.

I learned of this book via this post: https://bookjotter.com/2025/01/11/win... ...more

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