The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule

by Joanna Kavenna

Book Overview

An amazing journey through myth and history in search of a lost world To the ancients, Thule was a land beyond the edge of the maps, a northerly dreamland. It was a mystery for thousands of years, long thought to be an icy Eden, a place of exquisite beauty and unequaled purity. The lost world of Thule captured the imagination of poets, artists, explorers, and, most recently, writer Joanna Kavenna, who set out on a harrowing and exhilarating voyage...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670034738
• ISBN13: 9780670034734
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

kind of cool

This book is kind of cool. It's quite a bizarre book, and I wasn't sure when I started. But it's really moving in the end. It starts in Scotland and then moves around the North, traveling up to Iceland, Norway, Spitzbergen and Greneland. The bits about Greenland are just amazing - the author really describes it all so you feel you;re looking at a series of pictures. I thought the story she tells is very tragic indeed, about the wrecking of the north, the way it was destroyed in wars, by nuclear accidents, mass tourism, and now global warming. There aren't enough books about global warming that really take you to the places and show you what we stand to lose. I was left feeling very sad and as if we have left things too late. But at the end she says, don't give up, we have to keep on going, and there are people who are trying, adn there's a history of dreams. Like, we mustn't stop dreaming just because everything is getting so dark and shattered. It's such a good, unusual book. Highly recommended

Brilliant, beautiful!

I don't know what the other reviewer is talking about! Kavenna never orders room service - she doesn't stay in those sorts of hotels. She hardly mentions the Kontiki Museum - she refers to it once, doesn't go in there at all, and then moves into a very lovely description of the FRAM museum, a completely different museum. She is also intensely sympathetic to the Norwegian woman who was born to a German soldier and a Norwegian woman - she writes how much she feels the woman has been destroyed by history, by forces beyond her control. This reviewer below seems to expect Kavenna to gush, or to emote wildly - if you read European writers such as W G SEbald (a clear influence in this book) that's just not what they do. They are ironic, self-deprecating, and always alert to complexity. But that doesn't mean they're 'whinging'!!! But The Ice Museum is beautiful, resonant book, which is a wonderful portrait of the North, the severe and impressive landscapes you find. It's marvelously refreshing to read an account which deals as much with dark aspects of history - the Nazi ideas about Thule, the harsh conditions of the Eskimo in the north of GReenland - as with the beauties of the landscape. DON't read The ICe Museum if you are expecting some usual lot of travel dross about how amazing everything is, or about how lovely and funny the natives are. But Do read it if you love the works of W G SEbald and the like - serious, sonorous, realistic, rich, humane accounts of passion and cruetly, and all the shades of life good to bad that dominate in these remote places. A beautiful book - I heartily recommend it.

Gentle and Meditative

This is an account of a voyage in search of the mythical land of THule, which the Ancient GReeks wrote about, a land beyond the edge of the maps, in the far North. Thule was remote, very cold, beautiful, and completely strange. No one knew where it was, but explorers set off for thousands of years, trying to discover it. Eventually it became a symbol of the north and of distant lands, becoming particularly important during the great race for the North POle. Kavenna does a lot of hard-core travel in this book, including hitching up the coast of Greenland. She goes to Scotland, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Spitzbergen. I really enjoyed her account of the US Air base in GReenland - that could have been a standard piece of anti-AMerican ranting, but she manages to show what a weird posting it must be for the soldiers without mocking them. As a writer, Kavenna is very unegotistical - she is much more interested in the people she meets and describing the places around her than in her own personal quest and her own biographical details. The subjects she is describing are really interesting and there's a lot of fascinating geographical and historical information about the countries she visits - some of them remote, like GReenland, and not very easy to visit. I have not visited the places she goes to, except Scotland, and I really wanted to travel there by the end, especially to Norway, which Kavenna writes about with particular enthusiasm. I enjoyed her love of the North, whcih comes through very clearly - she communicates that love without becoming sentimental. I also liked the fact she was able to derive wry comedy from some of the things that happened to her - not everything is incredibly momentous and amazing, sometimes she actually describes the experience of following a lead that doesn't really go anywhere. This trial and error approach might annoy you if you're extremely impatient, but if you're \prepared to get into the gentle rhythm of the book and enjoy the quality of the writing then you really appreciate what she's doing. I thought it was very enjoyable indeed, and was only sorry at the end that Kavenna didn't travel into Siberia which, though not one of the lands of Thule, might have been am interesting trip!

CRAZY TALE

WOW! This book blew my mind! What was Thule? Where is it? I want to know! And KAvenna is too subtle in the end to tell me where it is for sure - she instead says we will always have Thules because we will always have dreams. What an amazing story. I was just amazed that there are't hundreds of books about Thule being published every year. I couldkn't believe it wasn't a story like Atlantis, the sort of story everyone has heard of. This is realy exciting stuff, the sort of scholarship that genuienly says something new. Buy it if you want something compltely different, a crazy tale!

Not Only But Also

A classic, I'd say! In the manner of Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux, Kavenna writes a travel book that is much more than a description of places. The Ice Museum is a wonderful story. It's about lots of really different things, but they all get stitched together by Kavenna's style, which really flows. So you read it like a thriller, even though it's dense with history. It's about (among other things) 20th Century history, polar exploration, the world wars, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Scotland, Germany, Roald Amundsen, BAltic independence, Richard Burton (the explorer), the rise of NAzism, the Cold War (there's a US airbase called THule in Greenland) the plight of the Greenlanders and lots more besides. I never knew a thing about Thule before I picked up the book. But I discovered that Thule is a forgotten story, one of those stories which turns up in the most unexpected places. Thule was a myth about a last land in the North, never a real place, so Kavenna is constantly writing about the difference between what you expect and what you get. She takes the reader through hundreds of years of ideas about Thule and then lands you in the mess of the 20th Century. Basically, it's a very profound book, but always readable. You'll love it.