Not the deep blue one with the endpapers that map Greenland and the Canadian arctic. Nor the turquoise one with the Inuit faces on the wide spine. Nor the dark green one with white letters and a white polar bear printed on the coarse fabric cover. But the first English-language book, a thick one titled Arctic Adventure, bound in pale blue with an embossed blue dogsled and blue driver. This one tells the tale of what it means to live inside your own breath. A house made of exhalations, as though your body were spinning itself a shell, as though you blew a bubble that froze solid, with you inside. The Danish-Jewish explorer Peter Freuchen was twenty years old his first winter in the arctic and bursting with vitality and enthusiasm for the other world he’d entered. He volunteered to stay alone on the edge of the ice sheet in Pustervig in northeastern Greenland for the duration of the dark winter of 1906–1907. A few other men were there at the beginning, in a stone and timber house built for the purpose, about nine feet by fifteen feet.
What do You think about The Faraway Nearby (2013)?
