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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Smokehole in the Chottagin, April 14, 2005
This review is from: A Dream in Polar Fog (Hardcover)
"If you don't want me to be angry, don't call me a white man." I'm loving Yuri Rythkeu's A DREAM IN POLAR FOG, the first novel by this author I have stumbled across. It has a strange, surreal storyline that seems to be a combination of Native People's origin myths and the underground of Dostoevsky. What happens when cultures collide? If they are cultures with very differing strengths, then one inevitably crumbles, and when McLennan, the Canadian sailor, is abandoned by the rest of his crew and left to die in the Arctic wilderness, he gradually feels his culture flake off of him like a snake his skin.
In its place he adopts many of the ways of the tribe who have taken him in and saved his life. Is this a case of Stockholm Syndrome? Almost, but it is Rytkheu's strength as a novelst to make this transition seem inevitable. You'll love the Chukotka people and their ways of doing things which have been authentic survivals from what must be the Iron Age. Their hunts, their feasts, their joys and sorrows are all seen through the half-sophisticated, half-adrift sailor boy John. When John stumbled across the carcass of a whale, the force of Rytkeu's writing hits you with a visceral punch, it's almost as if you were there in that terrible place of ice and decay. The notes and glossary are exemplary, printed in that "ghost" type (half the amount of ink as in the actual text) that Black Sparrow used to print the "Explanatory Notes" in Jack Spicer's "Homage to Creeley." I must comment also on the translation (out of the Russian) by Ilona Yazhin Chavasse. What a masterful segue from Russian to English--by way of the Chukotka tongue. You will feel effortless, like a plank on the sea, floating, through the pages of this book, like a dream in polar fog.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dream, December 11, 2009
This book brings you into the life of the Chukchi people, offering a believable and complicated portrait through excellently rendered Chukchi characters as well as the perspective of the unlucky Canadian sailor. They are a wise and proud people and their land, which you completely escape into through this novel, was and I hope still is worthy of their all-out efforts to live and prosper there. Do not, by the way, expect an intricately plotted novel (the climax, in particular, is 'not all that'). The plot falls into the rhythms of the Arctic seasons, and, as the Union-Tribune writes above, 'Dream' is "more a state of consciousness experienced than a tale told." I say experience it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Chukchi Adventure Tale, June 28, 2010
It is a story we repeatedly encounter in fiction ( Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics), Shogun) and of course in Hollywood ( Dances with Wolves (Full Screen Theatrical Edition), Avatar, Little Big Man): an outsider encounters an aboriginal culture and learns what it means to be truly human, scorning the imperialistic culture from which he came.
But Rytkheu does not fall into the trap of easy platitudes and sentimentality. He does not whitewash the brutal existence of the native culture at the center of the novel - northeastern Siberia's Chukchi people, and he paints both "sides" in many shades of grey. Indeed, Rytkheu is himself a Chukchi, and the focus of A Dream in Polar Fog seems less the clash of cultures than a portrayal of an utterly foreign way of life - that of a distinct, remote Siberian community before the invasion of modernity made many things easier, while washing away many things of value.
In actuality, however, the heart of this novel is an adventure tale in the best traditions of Jack London or Hemingway, and it is told in a rich, at times mesmerizing prose:
"They decided to row from shore, so that the motor's roar did not reach the breeding ground and frighten off the animals. Steadily, the oars dipped into the heavy, viscous water, and thickly the drops plunked down, rolling down the long oar blades. Only the creaking of the oarlocks broke the silence. The people did not speak amongst themselves, and not just because each one was busy with a task of his own, but such was the old custom - hunters don't open their mouths when there is no need."
As reviewed in Russian Life magazine.
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