Two Windows on the Arctic

Although it has long been presented as a kind of terra nullius, the Arctic is one of the birthplaces of what we now call transnationalism. Two recent books about that sprawling, unmanageable region bring together very different parts of outsiders’ experiences of the Arctic, but that transnational reality crops up every once in a while, and in surprising places. Pierre Perrault’s rightly celebrated travelogue Le Mal du Nord is alternately melancholy and awestruck, and it is a typically lucid, eloquent and rambling meditation on the meaning of landscape and navigation. A Québécois essayist, filmmaker and poet who has remained largely unknown outside his province, Perrault is recognized within Quebec for a body of work that explores the culture and history of his home and people. But what is striking about Le Mal du Nord is that Perrault only occasionally seems aware of how the Arctic illuminates some of the other problems that have preoccupied him...