Customer Reviews

Greenlanders

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Not many people now know that, during the Medieval Warm Period, Viking explorers discovered an island with a belt of verdant green girdling sparklingly white glaciers. Two colonies were planted on this "green-land", and soon were exporting dairy products and other things to Europe. But, as the Little Ice Age began to grip the Earth, life became harder and harder, until a European lifestyle became untenable in the new, harsher Greenland.

This is the story of the family of Asgeir Gunnarsson, a wealthy Greenlander farmer. As the world around them grows colder and darker, they go on about their lives: living and farming, competing and fighting, loving and singing. And each year, the winter comes earlier and life gets a little harder.

I found this book quite by chance one day, and was intrigued by it. It is a healthy read at 558 pages, but well worth it! Jane Smiley paints a fascinating picture of life in Viking Greenland, one that seems so true to the history books, and one in which the character seem so alive. Indeed, by the time you finish the book, you will feel like the characters in it are alive and right around the corner somewhere.

This is a great book, one that will appeal to anyone interested in the Vikings, and one that will appeal to anyone who loves good fiction. I highly recommend this book!

Our view of this book is a bit different than the other reviewers. We read this book as part of our preparation for a week touring in the old Norse Eastern Settlement, in Southern Greenland. It provided us with an excellent background for what we were to experience: walking the ruins of Erik the Red's Brattahlid farm, exploring the ruins of the Dyrnaes church farm, standing in the surprisingly intact nave of the Hvalsey church, listening to the account of the recent wedding there of an Icelandic descendent of the last known Norse couple (a Greenlander and an Icelander) to be married in that church and a native Greenlander. It really made the history come alive in this strange land that has to be experienced. Yes, the "Eskimos" (more accurately the Inuit) "won". Their descendents were our hosts. They accept and are proud of their country's Norse heritage as well as their own! This book is fiction-but is true to the recorded history from that time. Read the book for the history and then go and experience it for yourself.

I picked this book up at the store because of the attractive cover art. I had no idea that this story was written in the style of a Norse saga and it took a little getting used to. However, I was immediately drawn into the lives of Gunnar, his sister Margret, and their families as well as the details of daily life. Margret, whose emotional and physical needs are not met by her husband Olaf, dares to have a secret red dress that foreshadows events to come. She enters into an adulterous affair with a sailor who is working at the family's homestead. This illicit relationship leads to violence and tragedy. This happens about 80 pages into the novel and represented a turning point for me. Because I realized that this wasn't the kind of storytelling I am used to. I would never know as much as I wanted to about the characters feelings concerning life-changing events. At first, I was shocked at the detached recounting of major and often traumatic incidents. I could have put the book down, but I accepted this fact and continued to read because I wanted to find out more about Greenland. And that is the real story here, the story of the Greenland settlement and the forces that cause its decline.

The story doesn't focus on Margret throughout, rather it introduces different characters and as they are introduced, the interactions and influence of each person manage to create a bigger picture of what citizens of this isolated and bleak society faced. New facets are exposed, physical, mental and spiritual. Different aspects of the story include the increasing conflict with the Eskimos encroaching on the settlement as the weather gets colder in the north, the need to hunt in forbidden fjords as game becomes less plentiful, the abandonment by Europe as visits from the mainland decline and cease, the mystique of the American paradise they cannot reach, the introspection and ravings of their religious leader...There are visions, love-affairs, accidents, murders, family-feuds, starvation, death, exile, departures and all the rich descriptions of a land totally foreign to me. At one point a young girl chooses to marry a virtual stranger who arrives on a ship. When she sails away into the unknown world, leaving her homeland forever, I felt fear and excitement. Was she brave to leave? Or would it be braver to stay? I understood the total isolation of these people, their madness, their courage, and their battle to survive.

This was not a page-turner. It was a challenging read. But so well worth it. The simply stated feelings of the characters, which I was at first disappointed with, left me free to imagine what was going through their minds. And I did so vividly. When I finished this book I was awed at the web it had spun around me without my being aware. I had truly experienced a different time and place and I believed this story really happened. This is the best book I have read in a really long time.

I first read this book soon after it came out in 1988 or `89, and its magic has never left me even after having reread it more than once since. The story, written in spare but illuminating saga style and historically accurate as far as it's known, vividly fleshes out a time and place, a society struggling to survive while being virtually forgotten by the outside world, a society of which many today are unaware that it ever existed. The novel spans generations, set during the latter half of the 1300s to early 1400s (some evidence indicates that the last Greenland Norse remnants in the Eastern Settlement may have held on into the early 1500s). Although its two widely separated settled areas never numbered more than a total of perhaps five thousand persons at the max, to ask why it disappeared is, in a real sense, to put the cart before the horse. As the late geographer Carl O. Sauer reminded us in his 1968 book "Northern Mists," the first thing to be asked -- the obverse, the first side of the question of why Norse Greenland failed -- is how it survived for five hundred years. This remarkable medieval people endured over a span as long as that of the Roman Empire and a century longer than the American culture has yet done since the first permanent English settlements of the early 1600s with far more support from overseas. With a sure hand Smiley portrays a distinctive slice of humanity in all its strengths, weaknesses, capacity for good and evil, fallability, wisdom, and stoic acceptance of its own mortality. Unlike some more recent writing of hers I've seen, the author essentially "tells it like it is," and in the manner of a true saga lets the chips fall where they may -- thus allowing the reader to make one's own judgments. This book is a masterpiece.

I don't know anything about Jane Smiley - and not much about the historical background of this tale - but it certainly captured me for a time. At first, I was a bit confused about the fast pacing of the book, but then I started thinking that really was the point. The endless cycle of generations and human destinies came alive before me. Smiley's epic is extraordinary in that she doesn't try to make up drama. I felt she was a historian, a chronologist, who merely wrote up things as they happened. The objectiveness of her style is amazing. Someone dies, someone is born, a great wrong is done, life goes on. Cold-bloodedly Smiley describes hunger, disease, violence and all kinds of disaster, often wiping a significant amount of central characters out in a sudden rush - but that was how they went, the unfortunate lives of these people.

What adds to the book is the chilling knowledge, close to the end, that Gunnar, Johanna and the rest were to be the last of their people. That much I know about the history. In a sense, Smiley is being much more merciless than epic writers usually. She doens't set the reader free in the end. After all this suffering, there is no rest for these people - except in death. The ending is surely one of the most impressive I've read.

The best book I've read for a while.

I am used to reading modern literature which tends to get inside the mind of the character and move at a very slow pace. This book (being an epic, I guess, the epic form not one which I have read very much) moves quickly through time, and the overall effect being that no one moment of tragedy or accomplishment is overwhelming. Instead, there is a strong sense of impermanence, that events happen but then move so quickly into the past. This doesn't mean that you don't care about the characters because things happen too quickly. No, you do care, but like the characters, you see their joys and griefs tempered with the passing of time. The only thing that has puzzled me several times in reviews that I have seen (such as the reviews on this page, as well as the comments on the front cover of the book)is that different people or groups are described as pivotal in the book (some say Margret, some say Gunnar, some say the skraelings). I didn't find that. In my reading, it felt that different characters came to the spotlight for a time, but then fell back, then forward again, then back. The overall effect was that the story was about the community as a whole, and that the actions of one character were usually seen in relationship to the other characters around them. Final comment - there are some powerful, but very subtle, points revealed about the limited role of women in this society, and the unneccessary suffering that was often caused by the strictures of this society.

so I read the last 30 pages verrrrry slowly. After some initial hesitation due to the Scandinavian names and the stilted language in saga mode, I was carried away to 14th Century Greenland. The struggle for survival, breakdown of religion and laws, brought about by a coming Ice Age and cutoff trade routes with plague-infested Europe, intrigued me way beyond the turning of the last page.

A friend of mine recommended this book years ago, and just recently I got around to reading it. What an experience! Smiley has managed to capture the essence of a Norse saga here in content and language; often the words seem a translation of some ancient text. It's simply enthralling, from the characters you watch grow and change over decades to the unchanging, foreign, and overwhelming landscape of Greenland. Highly recommended, especially for anyone who enjoys historical fiction. This strange and beautiful novel was the best book I've read in years.

I was given this book by accident -- I was not a fan of ice, cold, old Norse, or any of it. I simply had nothing else to read. What I found between the pages was a story that has since inspired me to seek out every piece of known information on Greenland. Smiley's literary style in this book is to tell a fictional story as hard cold fact -- non-persuasive, non-judgemental. The depictions produce unforgettable mental visuals, making you feel more like a spectator than a reader.

This was the first big book I ever read, and I became engulfed in it's world. I didn't even know that the Norse had been there when I first picked up the book off the work cafeteria book shelf and was intregued and enchanted by the cover art so it was all new to me as I read. The book is very detailed and realistic and spans a great time frame. I also took a long time over reading it, and cried when it finnished, wanting to know what happened to the people in the book who I then knew and cared about. I long to see a film of it, though it would be a pretty epic undertaking to get it right or even close. I feel very personally involved in the story, and it is still a part of my psyche though I read it 10 years ago. If you like intrecate detail and have the time it takes, you too can go to Nordic age Greenland. Before reading this I had barely been able to complete a short novel, so the length is not an impediment, it gives you lots of time to be there. Learn, and enjoy!