Elida Høeg

Photos by: Ángel Valiente

Since I came to Longyearbyen, I have been reading The Notebook Trilogy by the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof. She had to leave her country during the failed revolution in the fifties, and fled to Switzerland. There she eventually started writing in French, not her native language, which gives her novels a clear, direct tone. The trilogy tells the story of two young boys, identical twins, that grow up together on the countryside during an unidentified war. One of them manages to run away, while the other brother stays behind. They spend decades writing to each other in a notebook, without reaching out, or even knowing if the other one is alive. The trilogy tells a story of migration, and how we can leave a piece of ourselves at the place we come from, sometimes missing it at the new place we come to. It is a feeling I have encountered talking to different people here in Svalbard, many being so far away from (what used to be) home. 

In search for new literature that describes life in the Arctic, I found two other books I would like to pass on. The first one is Naasuliardarpi (something like «flower valley» in English, I think it will be translated soon) by the Greenlandic writer Niviaq Korneliussen. The novel centres around the high suicide statistics in Greenland, and is hard to read, but also a gripping description of friendship, language and an activist attitude towards disappearing environments. The second one is Verda mi smeltar (something like «my world is melting», translated to German and Swedish so far) by Norwegian journalist Line Nagell Ylvisåker, that has been living in Longyearbyen since 2006. The non-fiction book is well known to Svalbardians, but for everyone else that would like to understand more about everyday life close to avalanches, thawing permafrost and glaciers, it offers reflective insights. 

The last book I enjoyed taking up again is the old classic Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The novel begins and ends with a polar explorer that meets doctor Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic, where he is looking for the creature he made – and that escaped from him. The polar expedition Shelley describes fails tremendously, and she wrote it almost hundred years before the rush of races to the North and South pole. Even if the book was published in 1818, it continues to be an absorbing comment on the limits of science and the concepts of «development» and «progress». And for those who understand Norwegian, the public broadcaster NRK has a quite cool radio dramatisation of the book from the eighties, with synth music by Vangelis, that is worth listening to. 

1. Agota Kristof – The Notebook Trilogy (1986). Here’s an essay by Slavoj Zizek on the book.  

2. Niviaq Korneliussen – Naasuliardarpi (2020). Korneliussens first book, Last night in Nuuk (2014), is translated into English. Here’s a review by NPR. 

3. Line Nagell Ylvisåker – Verda mi smeltar (2020). Here’s an English description of the book. 

4. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818). Here’s an online exhibition about Frankenstein and the Arctic. And here’s the Norwegian radio drama. 

Elida Høeg was nominated for a residency at Artica in September 2021, by our key partner Norsk Pen.