A DREAM IN POLAR FOG
Yuri Rytkheu, Iurii Sergeevich Rytkheu, , trans. from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. . Archipelago, $24 (337pp) ISBN 978-0-9749680-7-0
Siberian-born author Rytkheu chronicles a Canadian sailor's life among the Chukchi people of northeastern Siberia in a lyrical, instructional novel that reads like an adventure story wrapped around an ethnography. When ice traps John MacLennan's ship in the Bering Strait in 1910, not far from a Chukchi settlement, the youthful, naïve sailor, trying to widen a small fissure in the ice with dynamite, blows up his hands. His captain hires several Chukchi men to take him by dogsled to a Russian doctor—a long, arduous journey—and vows that the ship will wait for his safe return. But when gangrene sets in, John's hands must be amputated by a medicine woman, and when strong winds break the ice shelf mooring the
Reviewed on: 03/28/2005
Genre: Fiction
Other - 337 pages - 978-1-935744-47-4
Paperback - 337 pages - 978-0-9778576-1-6