Fiction: Donald Niedekker's ‘Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost'

Wall Street Journal

5 days ago

Between 1594 and 1597, the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz piloted three voyages through the frozen seas of the Arctic Circle in failed attempts to discover a northerly trade route to the Orient. In the last and most disastrous of these expeditions, Barentsz's ship became trapped in ice and his crew was forced to improvise a lodging on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya—or Nova Zembla, the New World—to survive the winter. Depleted by scurvy, cold and exhaustion, the captain died at sea during the return voyage a year later.
Donald Niedekker's evocative fictional reckoning with the expedition, 'Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost,' is narrated by an imagined member of Barentsz's crew who would ultimately perish on Novaya Zemlya. The book, translated from the Dutch by Jonathan Reeder, takes as its inspiration for the character an unnamed sailor found in the diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the real-life surviving shipmates, and invents for him a biography, making the narrator an itinerant poet who joins the crew to document its adventures. He duly records the wonder and terror of spouting whales and huddles of walruses ('an arbitrary patchwork of tails, heads, skin folds, tusks'), of polar-bear attacks and bewildering arctic mirages.
The wrinkle is that the narrator delivers his account 400 years later from the vantage of his grave in Novaya Zemlya, which the warming planet is beginning to thaw. He thus exists outside of time and space, and his omniscient gaze fixes not only on his own life and death but on the fortunes of others in the age of exploration, including the cartographer Petrus Plancius, whose assurance that the Northeast Passage would offer clear sailing planted the seed for Barentsz's catastrophe. Tragedy has not slowed in the centuries since the narrator's death: He has witnessed Stalin's gulags fill Siberia and seen his island used as a Soviet test site for a hydrogen bomb.
The quiet of the grave gives the narrator a serene detachment from all this havoc. The reflections, which drift in elegant patterns like blown snow, frequently muse on the vision of eternity inspired by the arctic void: 'Novaya Zemlya is the Nothing you must come to terms with. You do that by grasping that this Nothing is All, that All and Nothing are the same thing.'