Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole by Cecilia Blomdahl was a stunning collection of photos and stories about the author’s life in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago high above the Arctic Circle. Within its 258 pages Blomdahl tracks the sun through the calendar and orders her chapters accordingly. We start off with Polar Night, then move on to Pastel Winter, then Sunny Winter, then we have the midnight sun during Polar Day, and then the return of the setting sun ends the book with Golden Autumn. Whole text does not fill the pages with the exception of reproductions of Blomdahl’s diary entries. For the most part, the photos take precedence and the text is relegated to half a page. The pages were very thick and I always had to ensure I was not turning more than one page at a time. I was glad that the book was printed on matte paper as glossy pages would catch the glare of the light. I need to have a light shining down on each page as I read and would have had to constantly move the rather large book around to take in the beauty of the photos while avoiding the lamp’s glare.
Blomdahl’s photos of the glaciers and of her walks within them left me in awe. Sometimes openings in the ice enabled a person to walk underneath the enormous hulky cover to see what it looked like from the inside of a glacier. It looked organic, like exploring the body during an operation, yet not in red fleshy tones. While living on Svalbard she had numerous stories to tell of hearing mysterious rumbling sounds, and realized that it was caused by the thundering glaciers, sometimes heard when two were pushing against one another. Imagine the sounds of glaciers as they were moving across the North American continent millennia ago. I wonder how loud they would be as they advanced and retreated. While sitting across from the Nansen Glacier, Blomdahl wrote:
“There was a stillness that spread out across the bay, interrupted only by the eerie creaks and cracks of the thousand-year-old glacier ice. It stands as one of nature’s most breathtaking landscapes.”
I spent two days with this beautiful book, which I wouldn’t mind having on my own bookshelves. I know I could have finished it in a single sitting but with such gorgeous photos of the Svalbard landscape, the northern lights, glaciers and her dog Grim, I took my time with it. In spite of my praise I did notice a couple errors. For one, the map Blomdahl provides at the beginning of the book shows the Arctic Circle passing through Iceland and Southampton Island. It does not pass through either island, and is located to the north of each. She also misspelled Philippines as Phillipines. As a reader with a degree of low vision I could not read the text when it was white on yellow, yellow on white, or white on light blue without a viewing aid.
Blomdahl is an avid adventurer and a skilled photographer whose respect for nature will ensure that the Svalbard environment remains pristine. As she explored the archipelago she stressed the need to leave things as they were and to pick up after oneself.