Reviews for Prophets of Eternal Fjord: A Novel
by Kim Leine
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
*Starred Review* Surrounded by the stench of fermented blubber, Morten Falck ventures forth as a newly ordained Danish evangelist charged with Christianizing native Inuit in eighteenth-century Greenland. In compelling detail, Leine recounts the struggles of this flawed shepherd of tough and resistant souls. As he strives to teach sacred truth and perform holy rituals, Falck confronts the suspicions of natives who view him as just one more colonial oppressor. Far from the kind of inspirational figure that readers might find in, say, Dostoevsky's Father Zossima, the perplexed Falck repeatedly strays into strange paths as he deals with a flock entangled in heresy and sin. Attempting to reclaim a schismatic faction, he retreats in humiliation. Trying to hide a desperate woman's plight, he carries out a crude abortion. Salving an anxious cooper's conscience, he conducts an unlicensed wedding. But nothing pushes Falck further from the straight and narrow than his growing attachment to a widow resistant to the limits of orthodoxy. With her as his loving companion, Falck opens his ears to charismatic voices of Greenlanders beckoning him toward new spiritual horizons. Readers join Falck in exploring those horizons in a denouement that lingers in the mind. A seamless translation of an award-winning novel.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A pensive, provocative, altogether extraordinary novel of a small-scale clash of cultures and its tragic consequences. Why is it that entirely self-assured, Ahab-like proselytes so rarely figure in fiction? Perhaps because self-certainty is such an unsympathetic trait. No such worries for Morten Falck, a Rousseau-quoting, 37-year-old Danish missionary who lands in Greenland in 1787, a bundle of self-doubt mingled with overbrimming idealism. His arrival was, it seems, preordained, or so a fortunetelling youngster tells him after dunning him for three marks: "I can see a whole lot of strange people dancing in the fells.Black and dirty they are, but they're your friends and you're dancing with them." What else the youngster reveals will give readers pause, but whatever the case, Falck finds not just friendly dancers on the heights above Eternal Fjord, but also a cauldron of heated opposition to the presence of Europeans in Inuit country and the usual human failings, not least the comprehensive ambitiousness of his native catechist. Leine, who won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for this elegant epic, is a poet of Arctic places, conjuring just the right descriptions with economical prose (and ably served by his translator, Aitken): "All night the fog has had its clammy arms and pasty fingers far inside the fjords, but now sudden lagoons of sunlight and clear sky appear, magnificent visions emerge only to vanish again, as surprising as illusions." At the same time, his lyricism extends in some unusual directions, as when he describes the viscera-wrenching effects of the plague and the resultant "inexhaustible landslide of brown." If the ending is inevitably tragic, it is so because Falck cannot curb his paternalistic view of the native people even as they promise him meaningfully that "it is the pale faces in our country who will soon be gone." A boreal classic in the making, brooding and memorable, reminiscent of James Houston's great novel The White Dawn in its narrative sweep and evocation of an unforgiving land. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal
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In 2013, this sprawling, ambitious novel about Danish missionary expeditions to Greenland in the late 1700s won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, chosen by an intergovernmental body and presented to authors writing in Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish. At first glance, the subject matter might seem unpromising, especially to American readers, but this superb historical explores the moral complexities attending religious and economic colonialism in very intimate and powerful ways. The Danish outpost in Greenland where this story takes place is a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the two Danish missionaries at the novel's center are both deeply flawed individuals. The long-tenured priest, -Oxbol, is a sexual predator who has peopled the region with his illegitimate children. The priest sent to replace him, righteous, idealistic Morten Falck, isn't much better, stumbling through his mission and leaving a trail of suffering and disaster in his wake. Leine balances his exploration of colonial destruction with touching moments of human connection and intimacy. VERDICT Epic in sweep and noteworthy for its large cast of skillfully drawn characters, this is a lush, brave book about idealism and faith. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/15.]-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
