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A Woman in the Polar Night

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A Woman in the Polar Night

By: Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras - translator, Sara Wheeler - foreword
Narrated by: Rebecca Gallagher
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About this listen

This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content," but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies . . . But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.

©2010 Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin (P)2024 Tantor Adventurers, Explorers & Survival Ecosystems & Habitats Polar Regions Travel Writing & Commentary Heartfelt

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Amazing story of transformation

Really amazing story about a woman's experience living for a year in a hunter's hut in Spitsbergen. Lots of domestic detail about what it actually takes to live for a year in such an inhospitable place. Alongside stunning descriptions of the environment and the nature she experiences. Feels slightly odd sometimes that a lot of the personal elements are not there, for example we don't get a clear idea of the relationship she has with her husband and how she feels about him; at one point she mentions having a child at home but they are never mentioned again. The narration is a bit robotic and let's it down in places by getting the intonation wrong or failing to make the most of a joke. However this is an incredible tale of transformation and the power and joy of living simply in nature.

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