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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mostly True North, September 16, 2006
This review is from: The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (Hardcover)
I'll admit I was resistant to this book at first - I guess I expected a more scholarly, weighty approach, rather than Kavenna's very personal picaresque - but she won me over quickly with her elegant, lyric prose, her disarming, understated persona, and her expert blending of travel narrative and history of ideas, literature and exploration. She begins by visiting all the places that have been considered possible locations of Thule, the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, advancing northward, capturing what she sees as she smoothly explicates what other travelers have said about those places as Thule, and also examining the turbulent history of Arctic exploration at large.
To me, the strongest section of the book is when Kavenna grapples with the most hateful mannifestation of the Thule ideal - its expropriation by the Nazis as pristine mythico-historical homeland where snow white Aryan purity reigned. The Thule Society was one of many esoteric/political organizations that flourished in Europe, and one of the handful that served as an early focus and gathering place for what was to become the Nazi party. This confluence of modernist and fascist elements is as troubling as it is seemingly inevitable, and Kavenna approaches this treacherous territory with the proper measure of fascination and abhorrence.
Although Kavenna is very astute in her explication of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun's big botch, his championing of the Germans, her brief precis of his work is the one place where I found The Ice Museum demonstrably off the mark:
"He became nostalgic and impatient; he lurched away from the city, writing nothing but rustic romances laced with sentimentality, tales of robust hunting men of few words, clumsy in elegant company, chasing the daughters of the local merchants through the vibrant forests. They lived in huts like mine, they wore big boots, they knew nothing of manners and conventions; they were tormented brutes, aware that society judged them. They were good a whittling wood, and occasionally sheer frustration at their failure to ensnare a local beauty led them to a melodramatic act. One of the rustic hut-dwellers shot himself in the foot one morning because the beautiful daughter of the local businessman wouldn't talk to him."
It's hard to believe that Kavenna is old enough to have actually read the books and then forgotten so much about them. Anyone who has looked at Pan, the book she references, knows that it was in fact an early work and that its protagonist/narrator Lieutenant Glahn is no child of the land but, obviously an ex-army officer, which indicates social status, an extremely educated and articulate gentleman who chooses to live in a hut out of love of nature and a rejection of human society. And to say he shoots himself in the foot because Edvarda won't talk to him is criminal reductionism. Even August the old wandering protagonist of several of Hamsun's later works, although he does work odd jobs and pine over various beautiful daughters, is not an inarticulate brute, but an drop out from civilization, intent on living a life without ambition. There are a few books like Growth of the Soil which revolve around plain folk without the addition of a neurotic dreamer but they are very few, and Hamsun never loses the complexity of his vision.
I only wish she had at least glanced at Hamsun again before she wrote those words, but the "brute" idea fits so neatly with her arguments about the lure of fascism that she no doubt wanted it to be true. The other sad thing is that so few people are familiar with Hamsun that no editor called her on it before publication and so few people will know that it is utter bunk.
BUT otherwise I enjoyed the book. I worried as I neared the end because, like most picaresques, there's no natural ending that isn't an anti-climax. Unlike William Broad's The Oracle, Kavenna isn't going to "solve the mystery." But she accomplishes closure elegantly, describing her visit to the island of Svalbard, a place nobody thought was Thule, but which is icy and cold enough to be truly Thulean. Here she finds scientists charting the climate changes which have already meant great changes to the arctic regions and may yet be the end of Thule, if not all of mankind.
Throughout Kavenna is able to give a provocative depth to her breezy travel narrative, and I highly recommend it as an entertaining, informative read - perfect for the coming winter.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not Only But Also, February 27, 2006
This review is from: The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (Hardcover)
A classic, I'd say! In the manner of Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux, Kavenna writes a travel book that is much more than a description of places. The Ice Museum is a wonderful story. It's about lots of really different things, but they all get stitched together by Kavenna's style, which really flows. So you read it like a thriller, even though it's dense with history. It's about (among other things) 20th Century history, polar exploration, the world wars, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Scotland, Germany, Roald Amundsen, BAltic independence, Richard Burton (the explorer), the rise of NAzism, the Cold War (there's a US airbase called THule in Greenland) the plight of the Greenlanders and lots more besides. I never knew a thing about Thule before I picked up the book. But I discovered that Thule is a forgotten story, one of those stories which turns up in the most unexpected places. Thule was a myth about a last land in the North, never a real place, so Kavenna is constantly writing about the difference between what you expect and what you get. She takes the reader through hundreds of years of ideas about Thule and then lands you in the mess of the 20th Century. Basically, it's a very profound book, but always readable. You'll love it.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gentle and Meditative, February 27, 2006
This review is from: The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (Hardcover)
This is an account of a voyage in search of the mythical land of THule, which the Ancient GReeks wrote about, a land beyond the edge of the maps, in the far North. Thule was remote, very cold, beautiful, and completely strange. No one knew where it was, but explorers set off for thousands of years, trying to discover it. Eventually it became a symbol of the north and of distant lands, becoming particularly important during the great race for the North POle.
Kavenna does a lot of hard-core travel in this book, including hitching up the coast of Greenland. She goes to Scotland, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Spitzbergen. I really enjoyed her account of the US Air base in GReenland - that could have been a standard piece of anti-AMerican ranting, but she manages to show what a weird posting it must be for the soldiers without mocking them. As a writer, Kavenna is very unegotistical - she is much more interested in the people she meets and describing the places around her than in her own personal quest and her own biographical details. The subjects she is describing are really interesting and there's a lot of fascinating geographical and historical information about the countries she visits - some of them remote, like GReenland, and not very easy to visit. I have not visited the places she goes to, except Scotland, and I really wanted to travel there by the end, especially to Norway, which Kavenna writes about with particular enthusiasm. I enjoyed her love of the North, whcih comes through very clearly - she communicates that love without becoming sentimental. I also liked the fact she was able to derive wry comedy from some of the things that happened to her - not everything is incredibly momentous and amazing, sometimes she actually describes the experience of following a lead that doesn't really go anywhere. This trial and error approach might annoy you if you're extremely impatient, but if you're \prepared to get into the gentle rhythm of the book and enjoy the quality of the writing then you really appreciate what she's doing. I thought it was very enjoyable indeed, and was only sorry at the end that Kavenna didn't travel into Siberia which, though not one of the lands of Thule, might have been am interesting trip!
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