Customer Reviews

The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

I don't know what the other reviewer is talking about! Kavenna never orders room service - she doesn't stay in those sorts of hotels. She hardly mentions the Kontiki Museum - she refers to it once, doesn't go in there at all, and then moves into a very lovely description of the FRAM museum, a completely different museum. She is also intensely sympathetic to the Norwegian woman who was born to a German soldier and a Norwegian woman - she writes how much she feels the woman has been destroyed by history, by forces beyond her control. This reviewer below seems to expect Kavenna to gush, or to emote wildly - if you read European writers such as W G SEbald (a clear influence in this book) that's just not what they do. They are ironic, self-deprecating, and always alert to complexity. But that doesn't mean they're 'whinging'!!! But The Ice Museum is beautiful, resonant book, which is a wonderful portrait of the North, the severe and impressive landscapes you find. It's marvelously refreshing to read an account which deals as much with dark aspects of history - the Nazi ideas about Thule, the harsh conditions of the Eskimo in the north of GReenland - as with the beauties of the landscape. DON't read The ICe Museum if you are expecting some usual lot of travel dross about how amazing everything is, or about how lovely and funny the natives are. But Do read it if you love the works of W G SEbald and the like - serious, sonorous, realistic, rich, humane accounts of passion and cruetly, and all the shades of life good to bad that dominate in these remote places. A beautiful book - I heartily recommend it.

In the fourth century BC, the Greek merchant and explorer Pytheas (~380-~310 BC) traveled north through the North Sea, and finally ended up at a distant island, which he called Thule. Thule lies far to the north, on the edge of the Arctic ice, where the sun never set during midsummer. Many centuries later, Joanna Kavenna, a native of London, found herself dreaming of an untouched northern landscape, glittering in its perpetual ice. And so, she set out to find Thule...this is the story of her search.

In this interesting book, the author does a good job of combining two different stories into one narrative. First and foremost, it is the story of Ms. Kavenna's visits to the northern lands that could have been Thule - the Shetland Islands, Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard. Secondly, this is the story of the idea of Thule, from Pytheas's history and its ancient detractors, through the Romantics, the Victorians and even the Nazis.

Overall, I found this to be quite an interesting book. The author is not an archaeologist, so you will not find any startling information on the ancient north. And she is also not an environmentalist, so while the tale of pollution of the north is described, it is far from being an important part of the book. Instead, what you have is the story of Thule, Thule as it was dreamed of in the past, and Thule as it exists today.

WOW! This book blew my mind! What was Thule? Where is it? I want to know! And KAvenna is too subtle in the end to tell me where it is for sure - she instead says we will always have Thules because we will always have dreams. What an amazing story. I was just amazed that there are't hundreds of books about Thule being published every year. I couldkn't believe it wasn't a story like Atlantis, the sort of story everyone has heard of. This is realy exciting stuff, the sort of scholarship that genuienly says something new. Buy it if you want something compltely different, a crazy tale!

This book is kind of cool. It's quite a bizarre book, and I wasn't sure when I started. But it's really moving in the end. It starts in Scotland and then moves around the North, traveling up to Iceland, Norway, Spitzbergen and Greneland. The bits about Greenland are just amazing - the author really describes it all so you feel you;re looking at a series of pictures. I thought the story she tells is very tragic indeed, about the wrecking of the north, the way it was destroyed in wars, by nuclear accidents, mass tourism, and now global warming. There aren't enough books about global warming that really take you to the places and show you what we stand to lose. I was left feeling very sad and as if we have left things too late. But at the end she says, don't give up, we have to keep on going, and there are people who are trying, adn there's a history of dreams. Like, we mustn't stop dreaming just because everything is getting so dark and shattered. It's such a good, unusual book. Highly recommended

I loved this book from the first word to the last.
An exciting adventure for all those seeking a new and different journey. A trip you will never forget.!

Nobody really knew where the mythical land of Thule was, save the assumption that it was "the most northerly place in the ancient world." Pytheas began the legend by penning tales of this mysterious and unknown land. Over the centuries, fueled by this dream, others began to search. Fridtjof Nansen, Richard Burton, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Knud Rasmussen, the well known, the lesser known, the curious and adventurous began to head north. Ultima Thule, young men!

Joanna Kavenna's restless spirit drove her to follow the dreams of these
men, those who had explored and traveled mystical lands in search of Thule before her. She writes about her quest and adventure in her newly reprinted book, The Ice Museum: to Shetland, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard in Search of the Lost Land of Thule.

Planes, trains, automobiles, boats, thumbing rides . . . nothing could
stop her quest for the truth, a quest that soon became an obsession. She
traveled through countries, many of which most of us will never see save in history books, garnering fodder to solve the mystery of where Thule was located. She questioned the locals delving for hidden folklore, hitched a ride on a helicopter to Thule Air Base, talked to the former president of
Estonia, visited museums, and even, leaving no clue unturned, turned to
examine the role of the Third Reich and their infamous Lebensborn program in Norway during WWII.

The writing is exquisitely poetic, a writer's dream and reader's excuse for
languishing in thought and adventure without leaving the comfort of a
well-worn chair. I especially enjoyed the casual interviews Kavenna
conducted and at times almost wanted to join her in her obsessive search for Thule. The only drawback I could find was that her purple prose tended to be jarring at times . . . "In the languid summer evenings Iceland is a nature church, with everyone bowing to the scenery." All readers from the bunny slope denizen to polar explorers are welcome to travel with Joanna Kavenna to the northernmost regions of the globe.

This is not an adventure, travelogue or history, but at one time or other it is all three or some combination of the three. In the 4th century BCE Greek explorer Pytheas claimed to found "Thule" (pronounced Two-Lay), a land 'where the sun goes to sleep and the ocean turns viscous'. He did so by sailing northeast from Scotland for six days. From his account, since lost, it was a land of short winter days and long nights, came an entire mythology of a magical, northern realm hidden beyond the edges of civilization.

Kavenna's book is a recollection of anecdotes and brief historical explanation of the search for the Mythical Thule from the time of Pytheas up to the present. She travels to the most logical places such as the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Estonia (don't ask just read) and Svarlbard (aka Spitzbergen). What is strange is that she passes on the Faroe Islands who sit in a perfect spot. Interspersed throughout the book are poems that relate to Thule.

She does a grand detour and ends up in Germany, discussing the origin of the National Socialist (Nazi) under the name of the "Thule Society". They were the first group in post WWI Germany to avow that the ancient Germanic tribes (Aryan) came from "Thule" and that this group was the most 'pure' of all Germans. Some of the founding members of The National Socialist Party (which later merged with the German Workers Party to become the National Socialist German Workers Party, i.e. Nazi Party) were claimed as having been participants in this group.

Mostly, we learn that the 'North' is in trouble and that there is a major affect on the snow- and icescape by global warming. Especially poignant is her description of the way the Greenland Inuit have descended into a life of boredom, welfare, paternalism and alcoholism at the hands of the Danes. Her visit to Iceland is more of a travelogue and seems to miss the affect of alcoholism and drugs on that culture.

The book is really a voyage of discovery for Kavenna, and this is like a diary from which we are invited to read...some of it reminds me of the writings of Jack Kerouac in that it steam-of-thought and run on. It's an interesting read.