Anatomy of a Night by Anna Kim and German Literature Month

Anna Kim is a South-Korean born Austrian who has won many prizes for her fiction.

Her Anatomy of a Night was a stellar read for me from the point of view of imagery. Her view of the fictional east Greenland coastal village of Amaraq could not have been more artistically depicted. I saw it, smelled it, felt it through to my every pore. I heard the silence, the cracking of ice, the lone barking of a sled dog. In my view, the setting was the most important character in the book.

I must confess I had difficulty keeping track of many of the characters--and weren't there a lot! I know Kim spent time in an east Greenland coastal town and it shows.

In some ways, I'm confounded by all the suicides. We don't really get to know any one character particularly well. They all come from life situations that are painful, sad, and depressing. And certainly the Danish policies over many, many decades has caused such a disruption in Inuit culture so as to cause these disconnected, empty lives deprived of meaning.

But I'm still not certain exactly what Kim most wanted her readers to carry away after reading the novel. I'm not at all sure of her purpose, her intent. I feel this must be my lack somehow.

As much as I was uplifted by the landscape imagery, I was downcast by the constant, unremitting acts of suicide. Without relief. But my emotions about this were not so intense that I could not appreciate the artistic aspects.

I am now very curious about the history of Greenland and would like to read much more about that.