Name: The Greenlanders
ISBN: 9781400095469

Jane Smiley

In fourteenth-century Greenland, a small Norse settlement struggles for survival through increasingly harsh winters, famine, witchcraft, and a tragic feud between the family of Asgeir Gunnarsson and one of his neighbors. Reprint.

The Greenlanders

Daryl Houston

This is a deceptively large book. My edition has 580-something pages, but they are dense pages. It's kind of a slow burn with sluggish pacing and a meandering mode of story-telling. I've seen similar meandering story-telling in older literature and suspect Smiley is imitating the old Norse sagas or something similar. I liked the book a lot. It made me want to learn more about the culture (14th-century Greenland) she was writing about, and I frequently found myself looking up words and concepts -- wadmal, svid, Thing, tablet weaving, skraeling -- and to form a more accurate mental pictures of the landscapes and living situations of the book's inhabitants. I don't usually care all that much about characters, but I found myself invested in some of these. Smiley's story spans seasons and generations and offers a sense of both the harshness and the beauty of it all.