Strange Perfect Account From The Perma [TRADE PAPER ]

A haunting tale of Arctic exploration, hubris, and the enduring power of the past.

From his icy grave on Novaya Zemlya, a 16th-century Dutch narrator recounts a failed expedition to find a northeast passage to China. As he becomes one with the landscape, he witnesses centuries of change, meditating on human hubris and the forces that shape our world.

History and fiction collide in this boldly imaginative novel, populated by real-life figures, Arctic wildlife, and transcendent shaman.Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrostexplores the unchanging characteristics of human behavior and their impact on a changing natural world. For readers of literary fiction, historical novels, and stories of exploration and survival.

"Niedekker wants to expand our expectations for the novel, and in the process what we expect of ourselves; to make us consider how the history of mankind might overlap with 'the history of islands or the history of the snowy owl,' and how our own violent history — of knowledge as a spur to and by-product of conquest — has so often disrupted other histories." —Washington Post

"The wrinkle is that the narrator delivers his account 400 years later from the vantage of his grave in Novaya Zemlya, which the warming planet is beginning to thaw. He thus exists outside of time and space . . . Tragedy has not slowed in the centuries since the narrator’s death: He has witnessed Stalin’s gulags fill Siberia and seen his island used as a Soviet test site for a hydrogen bomb. The quiet of the grave gives the narrator a serene detachment from all this havoc. The reflections, which drift in elegant patterns like blown snow, frequently muse on the vision of eternity inspired by the arctic void." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Such an odd and fascinating premise gives way to a richly imagined, beautifully tl31