The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

By Christoph Ransmayr

Book Overview

A brilliant interweaving of journeys and voyages--geographical, historical, psychological--The Terrors of Ice and Darkness is the riveting account of a narrator obsessed with a certain Josef Mazzini, a young Italian "lost in the arctic winter of 1981" who is himself obsessed with the Imperial Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1873: "At first it was nothing more than a game to try to reduce the circumstances of his disappearance to some sort of explanation, any explanation. But every clue yielded a new unanswered question. Quite involuntarily I found myself taking one step after the other. . . . Cumulus clouds mirrored in a shop window became calving glaciers, patches of old snow in city parks became great floes of ice. The Arctic Ocean lay at my window. Much the same thing must have happened to Mazzini." Painstakingly retracing Mazzini's steps, the narrator simultaneously reconstructs the dramatic and fantastic story of the nineteenth-century journey, using actual letters and diaries of the members of that harrowing expedition. These documents--sometimes surprisingly poetic and moving--combine in the narrator's imagination to evoke as never before the awful beauty of the world's farthest northern reaches. In a novel as crystalline as the polar ice, as penetrating as the arctic cold, Christopher Ransmayr spins an adventure tale both spellbinding and paradoxical in its subversive undermining of conventional notions of heroism and exploration.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802134599
• ISBN13: 9780802134592
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Very well written and organized but oddly unfinished

For me, this book is a lively substitute for reading the full journals of the two commanders of the 1872-74 Austro-Hungarian expedition. Liberally cited and carefully chosen, contextualized excerpts convey the full drama and horrors of the 1872 voyage. The three levels of narrative (the narrator/Mazzini researcher, Mazzini, and the 19th century explorers) are well blended and less troublesome than they may seem to follow. I was hoping to find more clues for the mysterious disappearance of Mazzini than I found. It seems quite odd that the novelist didn't simply have him jump ship at the northern extremity of the voyage rather than bring him back to Spitzbergen. All-in-all, though this is a gripping novel and brought home the incredible endurance and steel nerves required of such expeditions before the age of comfortable icebreaking expedition ships, helicopters and snow-skidded aircraft.

Fascinating read

This is a very satisfying book... the author has interwoven the story of a 19th century arctic expedition with the modern-day mystery of a man obsessed with the "terrors of ice and darkness." The descriptions of the vast and desolate arctic landscapes are lyrical and moving; after an hour of reading, you may feel so pulled into this world of darkness and ice it is difficult to return ! A must read for any arctic history buff...

Ausgezeichnet

The Kirkus review does not do this book justice. It is quite good, especially for fans of historically accurate novels.