cover image Night Times and Light Times: A Journey Through Lapland

Night Times and Light Times: A Journey Through Lapland

David Hay Jones. Hamish Hamilton, $0 (214pp) ISBN 978-0-241-12243-3

Escaping from an unhappy marriage, British author Jones sets off on a trek through the mountains of Samiland, popularly known as Lapland, a region that includes the northern portions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Soviet Union. After a traveling companion becomes disgruntled with the weather and the hardships of hiking, he proceeds alone, then joins a tour group to the Sami region of the Soviet Union. Jones finally settles in Samiland with a Swedish nurse. Ostensibly the book is about the Sami, the nomadic people who inhabit this vast arctic region, but in actuality his tale is one of encounters with tourists and others who are destroying the Sami culture and the lands these nomads have roamed for centuries. As depicted here, the Sami themselves are elusive, seeming merely to embody the ideal of self-sufficiency that the author, in an attempt to find himself, seeks to emulate. Photos. (Aug.)