The Greenlanders, by Jane Smiley

Originally published on Josh Friedlander's Goodreads Reviews.

Man, I really don't think people should just read for sheer escapist pleasure, but on the other extreme you have this book, which presents an unrelenting procession of gloom: people living on the very edge of subsistence in medieval Greenland, where one bad winter can basically wipe out the entire settlement, and unfortunately, most of the winters are bad. Infants starve to death, supplies run out, people get murdered and burned at the stake. You know you are reading something truly bleak when seals being clubbed makes you feel relieved. It is all narrated in a sing-songy "Norse epic" style (spare language, a lot of repetition), and it reminded me somewhat of One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book which went on and on for multiple generations where everyone has the same name. And also of the other modern Norse epic The Long Ships, which takes place a few hundred years earlier and also deals with contact between pagans and Christianity, and a bit of Islam (here the natives have become much more Christian, except for the indigenous people [skrælings] who they see as half-demonic, and there is a running commentary on the Avignon Papacy). But that book is a lot more fun and light-hearted; this, for the most part, a grim and unforgiving march of doom.

P.S. I looked up some of the history behind this after finishing the book. Definitely did not know that Norsemen settled in America half a millennium before Columbus (fragments of which still stand, at L'Anse aux Meadows), and as described in the Saga of Erik the Red which is basically historically accurate?! And subsequently settled in Greenland as well - the familiar story is that Erik the Red intentionally misnamed it to encourage settlement, an unfortunate decision as the "Little Ice Age" (the beginnings of which were during this book's timeline) actually destroyed the entire colony, leaving only the skrælings until the eighteenth century. So in a sense this book is about the twilight of life in a climate which is slowly ceasing to afford human existence.