Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost

“I am the nameless crew member who died on January 27, 1597.” So reports the Dutch narrator of Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost from his icy grave on Novaya Zemyla, an Arctic archipelago separating what is known today as the Barents and Kara Seas in Russia. But when this expedition set out to find a “northeast passage” from Europe to China, the landmasses blocking such a route were unknown. As the expedition fails, the narrator becomes a sentient part of the landscape, privy to centuries of change. Meditating on the realities of human hubris that led to his early demise, unpacking his childhood in and around Amsterdam, and commenting on the dramatic technological and climatic changes he endures, history and fiction clash with tectonic force. From real-life figures like cartographer Petrus Plancius to Arctic foxes and transcendent shaman, and peppered with references to countless historical events—ranging from the Reformation to Stalin’s labor camps and atomic weapons testing—this boldly imaginative, profoundly beautiful novel argues that the unchanging flawed characteristics of human behavior are unquestionably why the natural world has changed in so many ways. What all have I collected in my ice grave? And what has my memory woven through it? What is there for me to tell? I trav­eled with shamans through both upper and nether worlds. Shock waves brought me news of earthquakes, tsunamis, crop failures, and volcanic eruptions, and they were joined by the whisper of underground voices, not all of which, admittedly, I was able to make out or decipher, but which did deposit a fertile layer with­in my memory. Those layers piled up, and over time—a span of centuries— gravity did its work, and even in the forever-frozen ground, small volcanic outbursts occurred and higher-lying deposits broke through the older layers, allowing the sediments of memory to seep down to earlier times, mixing together the old with the new.