Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk

Qalingu, now in the thick of the blizzard, was fast losing hope. His face was encrusted with snow and he could not make out the slightest thing. Nonetheless, he plodded on into the wind. His cheeks were freezing and his entire body was feeling the cold. With night falling, he decided to take shelter on the side of the hill away from the wind, while there was still some daylight. Without even a snow knife, he began digging a hole for himself in the snow, all the while afraid of being smothered by the blizzard.

Sanaaq is billed not only as "An Inuit Novel" but "The First Inuit Novel," or at least, the first novel written in the language Inuktitut. Author Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, it seems, was tasked by missionaries with helping to prepare educational materials in Inuktitut. But the project soon took on a creative bent, and Nappaaluk, seeking at first to show the use of the words in context, I suppose, wrote this novel, about the widow Sanaaq and her life among the nomadic people of far northern Quebec.

Above all else, Sanaaq is a portrait of what life was, or perhaps is, among the Inuit. Much of the novel is taken up by the ordinary tasks of life: sewing bags and mittens, building and deconstructing igloos, fishing and hunting--both of which, it seems, often must take place at a moment's notice, when the fish begun to run or the polar bear appears (or the fox, or the ptarmigan, or the seal, etc., etc.). But it's a life, too, that's close to death, and in Nappaaluk's simple prose, moments of intense disaster and loss take on tremendous meaning. I was really struck by one scene in which a character, splashed by boiling water, loses his eye, which is so melted it falls literally on the ground. Another scene, in which a hunter slips beneath a floe of pack ice and is lost forever, underscores just how fragile life must be at the top of the world, and how present the possibility of death and disaster. Among these moments of quotidian and not-so-quotidian life, Nappaaluk sketches a number of compelling characters: the headstrong widow and her impetuous daughter Qumaq among them.

One of the most interesting things about Sanaaq is that Naapaaluk captures the arrival and slow integration of Europeans into the life of the Inuit: the arrival of the first boat, the first airplane, the missionaries, the doctors and nurses. These watersheds are compacted in time, so that Sanaaq's life, simple as it is, seems to span centuries. At the beginning of the novel, Sanaaq and her family are terrified by the plane that roars for the first time overhead; by the end, Sanaaq's husband himself boards  a plane to join a work program for the Inuit. Disruption and change are inextricable from the arrival of Europeans and European-Canadians: at one point Sanaaq runs away with her injured daughter because she is afraid she will be taken from her to bring her to medical care. Sanaaq's husband reacts violently, and it is Sanaaq herself that ends up being sent away to the southern hospital, and the outside authorities, the priests and the police, visit her husband to reassert their authority. At the same time, it's clear that Sanaaq is the work of a pious Catholic; Sanaaq's own conversion--from Anglicanism!--is meant to serve as the novel's resolution. Sanaaq is an interesting artifact in that its attitude toward colonial presence is not quite what we would expect in the 21st century. Beyond that, it's a hell of a story.

Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

And then the creature dipped its head, tucking its narrow snout into its chest. In a moment its legs unfolded, covered in dark fur and bent like a dog's, but much too long. It stood up on its rear paws, which were the size of an adult's splayed hand, revealing a torso that was sleek and wrapped in fur but without the barrel of protruding canine ribs. This chest was flatter and wider, muscled like a man's. The face was dominated by glint and wet--bright yellow eyes rimmed with a pink third lid, and a mouth rammed with splintery teeth, too many to comprehend.

Joan's husband Victor has been gone for over a year, but she hasn't given up searching. Her family suspects he has left her, but her grandmother and her friend, a foul-mouthed elder named Ajean, know there are dangers in the northern Ontario woods where their Metis community is located. Joan grew up hearing stories of the rogarou, the fearsome werewolf-like creature that possesses a man, wearing his skin like a suit, making him forget he was a man. When Joan discovers Victor has become a traveling preacher under the name Eugene Wolff (get it), she realizes that he has been possessed by the malevolent rogarou--but is it Victor who is the rogarou, or the sinister German man bankrolling the Reverend Wolff's tent revival?

The rogarou, in Cherie Dimaline's Empire of the Wild, is a representation of all the malicious forces that drive the Metis, the descendants of Cree and French voyageurs, off of their traditional homes. Just before his disappearance, Joan and Victor argued about his desire to sell a tract of valuable lakefront property to white developers--a lucrative deal, to be sure, but one that would leave the Metis pushed back once again into the depths of the woods. When Joan confronts Heiser, the sinister German, he confesses that the tent revival is the perfect thing to distract "Indians" from the pipeline being built in their backyard, pipelines which will make him even richer.

There's an interesting distinction the novel make between revival-style evangelical Christianity, which is a lie and a distraction, and the traditional Catholicism of Joan's Metis family, which, like the traditional beliefs that help ward off the rogarou, are potent and communitarian. Heiser, for his part, turns out to be a Wolffsegner, which--I'm only guessing here--is a figure of Germanic legend who control wolves, including rogarous. It's Victor who is the rogarou, the betrayer figure who is taken in, like possession, by the insane idea to give away the land. Heiser is the white European all to ready to make use of those who would betray the Metis community from the inside.

I suspected as much going into it, but despite the interesting First Nations cultural gloss, Empire of Wild struck me as a standard pulp thriller, the kind of book with obscene grandmas and plucky teen sidekicks, and where people say things like, "I knew it was you, you son of a bitch!" There's something all-too cinematic about it, as if the book itself exists to be turned into a film or a television show, where the horror and suspense can be buoyed by special effect and swelling strings. As a book, though, it wasn't for me.

The Rifles by William T. Vollmann

You came to another lake whose shore was paved with white slabs (and the sky was barred yellow, red, and orange).  But that was not the source of the river, either.  You arrived at the shore of a wide, grey, ankle-deep lake, over which a single bird twittered.  Bands of muted color rippled across that lake.  It flowed steadily in the cool breeze you barely felt.  Black rocks stuck up in it like birds.  The water was pure and good to drink.  Two birds chased you, screaming through the sky.  And you went over another little rise and there was a lake whose waters rippled black and blue and orange and silver, and there was a jet-black ridge behind it topped with blue clouds, and the lake went on and on and on and there was another lake behind it and streams ran out of that lake in all directions and at last you understood that the river you had followed had no one source, that these lakes were permafrost melt; the whole island was permafrost; when you were on the island you were on a world of rivers that came from everywhere.

In the 1840's Sir John Franklin made a final attempt to reach the Northwest Passage aboard the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.  It was his final attempt because he and his crew got stuck in ice for three years just off of King William Island and died.  It seems to have been a baroque and nightmarish experience: some slowly died of lead poisoning from improperly canned food, others of tuberculosis; some starved on their way trekking across the ice in a last ditch attempt to cross thousands of miles of arctic tundra on foot.

William T. Vollmann's The Rifles tells the story of Franklin's expedition, intertwined with a modern narrative centering around a character called Captain Subzero, a name given to him by some local Inuit children when he first arrives in the Canadian arctic.  Subzero is a stand-in for Vollmann himself, and seems to share a lot of Vollmann's experiences, including accidentally setting his own sleeping bag on fire during an ill-advised attempt to spend a week in the harsh winter in the far north.  Your guess is as good as mine whether, like Subzero, falls in love with an Inuit girl whom he continually returns to visit, impregnates, and abandons to commit suicide.  You'd think the answer is no, but with Vollmann, whose whole schtick is immersing himself in whatever he's writing about, who once joined the mujahideen to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, there's no telling.  I'm going to assert that the "Reepah" parts of the story are mainly fictionalized, because otherwise The Rifles would be very difficult to read.

Subzero believes himself to be the reincarnation of Franklin: a European on a doomed arctic voyage.  But that description doesn't really capture what Vollmann does here, skipping from Franklin to Subzero as if they really are the same person, sometimes in the space of a single sentence.  The whole thing induces whiplash:

Then too there was the matter of his own preferences.  A gentleman puts these aside in favor of others whenever he can, of course, but by GOD he did think that he too had some right to complete the Passage! -- A gentleman is a gentleman: he gave way to Sir John, or rather to his wife. -- As for this matter of Reepah, here I must confess to have been indulging in historical reconstruction.  Such thoughts could only have occurred to Sir James if time works both ways -- that is, if simply because Subzero had become the reincarnation of Franklin, Franklin must then have become (to however slight an extent) identified with Subzero in some manner.  Ask yourself: are you behaving differently at this very moment because someone not yet to be born for a century or more will someday think about you?  You cannot prove the contrary.  -- What's the difference anyway whether it's so?  Ice-floes, no matter how white, and water, no matter how blue or grey, eventually reach the same color in the distance.

Vollmann's become a hot commodity lately thanks to the popularity of Europe Central and The Dying Grass, a 1000-page novel about the Nez Perce that's part of the same series as The Rifles investigating European interactions with Native Americans.  But most of what I could find people saying about The Rifles was largely negative.  I understand why people might feel that way: Vollmann's immersive tactics can seem precious, rather than innovative, and the metafictional stuff might seem tedious.  To those voices I add: I wish that we would stop using victimized women as symbols of colonized lands, which is something that The Rifles' Reepah has in common with the Pocahontas of Argall.

But I think there's a remarkable honesty in Vollmann's project.  Subzero mistreats Reepah fabulously, refusing to leave his wife for her or vice versa.  He loves to entertain the radical idea of moving to the Canadian arctic and settling down with an Inuit woman, but when provided the opportunity, he finds that he can't take the other foot out of the old U.S. of A.  In this way, Vollmann aligns himself not with the beleaguered Inuit, but the Europeans who introduced the rifles to them, which ended up devastating their hunting practices.  It's no coincidence that Reepah kills herself with a shotgun.

One reviewer complains that Vollmann has nothing insightful to say about the Inuit, but I think that's the point; it's impossible, Vollmann argues, for the descendants of white Europeans to really understand the First Nations whose historical oppression they have inherited.  By aligning himself with Subzero, Vollmann doesn't shy away from that inheritance or minimize it.  That's one of the reasons that this book, which takes so many weird liberties in other ways, is so scrupulously researched and footnoted: all the knowledge and research that Vollmann/Subzero possesses cannot stop him from reenacting the calamities of colonialism over and over.

Other things I really admired about this book are: the sharp, observant descriptions of the Arctic landscape, which do a great job distinguishing one island from another.  Not all Arctic islands, it seems, are created equally, which is something the Inuit found out who were forcibly removed to the far northern outposts of Grise Fiord and Resolute by the Canadian government.  I loved the description at the top of this review, which emphasized their status as terra incognita, which obviate any attempt at wayfinding, and which echoes just how lost the Franklin expedition becomes.

And though her fate in the book is tragic, I thought the depiction of Reepah was charming and lovingly drawn.  I have no way of telling if her unstudied English is an accurate depiction of how an Inuit woman might talk, but it felt real.  "Someone stole my secrets," she says, poetically, and only several paragraphs later we find that she means that someone stole her cigarettes.  She has a real life on the page that contrasts to the dead-eyed foolishness and selfishness of Subzero, or the obsessive fatalism of Franklin.

Ultimately I really liked the unpredictable seesawing of time in The Rifles, which added an element of novelty to the hyperhistorical slog that is Argall, a book I also really liked.  There are three more of these books, most of them big bricks nearing or passing a thousand pages, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to read those, now, too.