A Dream in Polar Fog

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 of state of consciousness experienced than a tale told." I say experience it.

This is one of those life changing books, found by accident and passed on to as many friends as I could get to read it. The translation picked up the subtle mood of the story and the "lessons" were a melody which keeps ringing in my ears. Others have described what happens in the book. I will just say that after I finished the book, there was wonder, clarity, and a peaceful feeling akin to a snowy day sparkling in filtered light.

This was a hard book to put down once I'd started. The story has a stranded Canadian sailor, John McLennan, as its main character, whose life is saved by the Chukchi. During his becoming adapted to their way of life and marrying among them, he finds the English language useful in communicating with and warding off occasional scientific explorers and other adventurers, who find these inhabitants and their land of Wrangel Island off Siberia tempting prey for get-rich schemers. The full range of lean and prosperous seasons in the stark, isolated landscape circa 1910 to 1917 is heartbreaking and joyous in turns. The reader will find plenty of walrus and nerpa and other sea animals and their usefulness to wonder at. The flavor of the this slice of life comes through too from the translator's leaving in some authentic everyday words, whose meaning is immediately appararent from the context or the aid right at the bottom of the page.

. . it could rival all the great ones. It is truth, beauty, moral, honest, and an important statement about mankind. It is a fresh as morning light dancing off the snow and is not dull or predictable at all. . what a masterpiece. I recommend it highly to anyone who thinks and enjoys a deep connection with our natural world.

A wonderful story taking place in the early 20th century of a seriously wounded Canadian adventurer, left behind in the unknown wastes of the Arctic with the Chukchi people whom he first barely deigns to recognize as human. Slowly becoming part of this unfamiliar civilization and their harsh daily fight for survival it dawns him to question his former "civilized" life and the motivation for his people's expansion into the arctic habitat. Filled with beautiful details of a quickly vanishing culture this novel doesn't allow you to put it down before having inhaled the last words of "A Dream in Polar Fog".