The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

A man attempts to explain the disappearance of an Italian explorer in the Arctic in 1981 by reconstructing an Austrian expedition of a century before and, in the process, dispels many cherished notions about heroism

Novels with explicitly novelistic themes are often bloodless, carrying the fatal odor of the sheltered writing workshop; Austrian writer Ransmayr's first novel, however, is a stunning exception. (His second book, The Last World, was published here last year to critical acclaim.) The underlying concerns of this work are primarily literary--creator vs. creation, history vs. fiction, the nature of metaphor, etc.--but here they inform a singularly gripping tale. A nameless and largely invisible narrator recounts the 1981 disappearance of one Josef Mazzini, whose fascination with a 19th-century polar expedition has pulled him north, to the furthest arctic settlements. Accounts of the two journeys intersect and diverge, challenging the notion of history as linear, seducing the reader with startlingly detailed descriptions of polar exploration. Members of the 19th-century expedition, pursuing honor, glory and other vanities, endure two frigid winters when their ship is trapped in ice: their beards freeze, they are blinded by snow and ill with scurvy, but the Bible is read every Sunday. A century later men approach the icy expanse with snowmobiles and Walkmen, undertaking selfinterested scientific projects. This aggressively intelligent narrative transforms the polar regions into unusually fertile ground.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ransmayr's first novel, originally published in 1984 in Germany, is released now in the US after his second novel and American debut, The Last World (1990). As in The Last World, Ransmayr here depicts a journey to the edge of the known globe. Where Last World took the form of a search for Ovid out into the hinterlands of classical civilization, Terrors follows a narrator to the North Pole, the last unconquered territory of 20th-century exploration. Ransmayr's narrator becomes fascinated with Josef Mazzini, a missing author who enjoys ``playing a game with reality'' in his writing: after he has written an adventure story, he does historical research to see whether it has a precedent, convinced that whatever he fantasizes about must have happened in the past. Mazzini has become obsessed with the North Pole and seems to have found ``proof'' of his fantasy of an exploration there in the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872. Absorbed by a journal from the 1872 adventure, Mazzini sets out for the region himself, never to return. Perplexed by the disappearance of Mazzini, Ransmayr's narrator is drawn into the lore of North Pole expeditions. Unfortunately, neither Mazzini nor his overseeing narrator actually does much above the level of extended musings and historical homework. Of course the trip Mazzini makes is primarily a psychological one, but his personality, along with that of the narrator, is so thinly defined that Terrors fails to charge up a sustained inquiry into a complex psychic state. For all the internal gadgetry, Ransmayr's story fails to circumnavigate a single, compelling character. In the end, a chilly academic exercise. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This first novel, whose author has since been celebrated as one of the German language's most gifted young novelists, appeared in 1984. An impressive debut, it tells the gripping tale of the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition of 1872-74, describes a young Italian's ultimately fatal obsession with reconstructing this expedition in 1981, and traces the narrator's growing fascination with this man's fate. The text transcends the novelistic genre by quoting liberally from documentary records, thus becoming history and travelog as well as fiction. The highly readable, unobtrusive translation also deserves mention. Ransmayr's novel is a fine addition to any general fiction collection.
- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.