As followers of this blog will know, my hero is Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the author of the landmark travel memoir An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, which was my Togolese choice for my 2012 project to read a book from every country. After the book was rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2021, Kpomassie and I became friends. In the final chapter of my new book, Relearning to Read, I write that I hope I will one day travel to Greenland with him.
This summer, I got to do just that, spending two weeks travelling along the west coast of the world’s largest island, stopping at many of the places Kpomassie first visited sixty years ago, courtesy of the expedition cruise company Aurora Expeditions (known as AE Expeditions in the UK).
It was the trip of a lifetime and a huge privilege to experience such an extraordinary place in such exceptional company. In addition to countless illuminating discussions about Kpomassie’s inspirations, and views on everything from writing and family to travel and alcohol, I got to meet some of his friends, including a woman who was four years old when Kpomassie first visited Greenland in 1965 and stayed with her family.
This weekend, the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper published my account of our adventure in their Travel supplement, giving it the honour of making it the cover story. You can find the online version here. I hope it will be the first of several kinds of storytelling that come out of this amazing adventure.
This month, a dream came true. I spent two weeks visiting Greenland with my hero, legendary Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, sixty years after he first arrived in the country that became his home from home (an experience recorded in his landmark memoir, An African in Greenland, tr. James Kirkup, and recently rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic, titled Michel the Giant, with a new afterword, tr. Ros Schwartz).
It will take me a while to process this incredible experience and I am working on several projects to tell the story of it. Watch this space!
In the meantime, however, I decided it would only be right to make Greenlandic literature the focus for my latest Book of the month. And, it being #WITMonth, I knew I would feature a book by a female author.
If you ask anyone about contemporary Greenlandic literature, one name will dominate: Niviaq Korneliussen, a young Greenlandic writer hailed widely as the leading light of a new generation of voices telling stories on the world’s largest island. Her writing is fresh, daring and confronting, and having started the month reading her novel Last Night in Nuuk, I would have found it an easy choice to feature one of her books. (And she is extremely well worth reading – if you are looking for Greenlandic literature you should absolutely start with her.)
But as I try to highlight lesser known voices on this blog, I decided to look further afield. This brought me to Nauja Lynge’s Ivalu’s Color, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press.
Lynge is something of a hybrid writer. Describing herself as a Danish Greenlander, she is the descendant of several figures who were instrumental in establishing Greenlandic identity, including Henrik Lund, author of the national anthem, and Hans Lynge, who promoted independence. At first, given her Danish heritage, I was hesitant as to whether to include her in my reading. But as many of the conversations I have had over the past few weeks have involved the influence of colonialism and other political agendas on Greenland, and the way those stories are woven into the Inuit experience (and, as we have seen over the thirteen years of this project, storytelling is a messy, cross-pollinated business that rarely fits neatly in a single box), I decided to give Ivalu’s Color a try.
From the pitch, the novel sounds as though it follows a familiar formula. In 2015, three women are found murdered in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Whodunnit?
Yet, the similarities with anglophone crime fiction end with the premise. Even before you turn to the first page, it’s clear that this is a book that marches to a different beat. In place of a blurb, the back cover has a lengthy endorsement from Martin Lidegaard, former Danish foreign minister. And on the inside flaps we are told that the true victim of the crime will turn out to be the Inuit people.
This political focus continues in the body of the book. In place of an epigraph, we find an unattributed paragraph appealing for a moderate approach to Greenlandic independence:
It’s almost as if there is a chapter in our common history missing. My major concern is that we open the doors to outsiders before we are ready to welcome them. Things take time. This applies to Greenland to such an extent that we might be better off seeing ourselves as a developing country, not co-opted immediately into the international economy.
The characters of the book take a similar tone. Indeed, rather than focusing on the grisly fate of the three women whose bodies have been found in a shipping container (two of whom are barely mentioned), most of the dialogue rehearses political concerns, feeding off the fact that Ivalu, the most prominent victim, was a blogger on issues connected to independence.
Unlike the traditional anglophone detective novel, there is not one sleuth on the trail of the culprit but many. They include the Chinese agent Hong and the Russian agent Nikolai (both of whom do little to disguise their roles in trying to further their countries’ interests in controlling the Arctic), as well as local figure Else.
Like the murder victims, these characters remain relatively faceless. What seems to interest Lynge is not so much the personal stories of the figures she portrays but the bigger forces that drive them. These she explores by choosing to focus on aspects a mainstream anglophone writer would not normally centre, and selecting and ordering details in a way that might seem bewildering or even irrelevant to a Western eye. It is as though the apparatus of a European crime novel has been commandeered and turned to different ends.
As a reader, I found this challenging. The old knee-jerk irritation I often feel when I struggle to understand literature that works on other terms rose in me, and I was tempted to dismiss the book as bad. Indeed, there are aspects of Ivalu’s Color that will be deeply problematic for many anglophone readers, particularly when it comes to the presentation of Hong. Lynge describes him and his actions in terms that betray a strikingly different, even shocking, approach to presenting otherness.
There is also a challenging discussion of femininity and ‘primal’ womanhood running throughout the book, which at times seems to take a stand against ‘the modern age’s fussily democratic women’. This, when set against Hong’s shocking encounter with Else, raises uneasy questions.
However, as I continued on through the pages of this book, I found another Greenlandic title that I was reading in conjunction with it beginning to shift my thinking. Knud Rasmussen’sThe People of the Polar North, tr. and ed. G. Herring, features the verbatim accounts of many Inuit myths collected by the great explorer on his expeditions through his homeland. Striking and strange, these tales share some of the hallmarks of Lynge’s writing. There is a similar relative effacement of the individual and focus on bigger forces. Extreme and sometimes shocking acts are presented baldly and with little ceremony. They inhabit a framework that calibrates ideas of community, duty, tradition, physicality and individuality very differently. Perhaps Lynge was fusing the storytelling ethos of the country of her birth with the commercial structures of European literature? Wasn’t that, in itself, thought-provoking and subversive?
For me, Ivalu’s Color wasn’t an easy or enjoyable read, but it was a valuable one. It was fascinating to see Nauja Lynge testing the limits of a familiar genre and trying to reshape them to accommodate her aims. It was a reminder that truly reading widely (far beyond the offerings that the mainstream outlets curate for us) requires openness, and a readiness to embrace gaps and questions. There is still so much we don’t know.
Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press (IPI, 2017)
This novel was a recommendation from leading English-Danish translator Signe Lyng. After we met at the Dublin Book Festival in November, she generously sent me a list of recent Danish-language novels that she admires, including Niviaq Korneliussen’s Last Night in Nuuk and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.
One of Lyng’s suggestions stood out to me for two reasons: firstly, because it came out twelve years ago and so the English-language version was likely to fit my criteria of only featuring books published pre-2021 on this blog this year. Secondly, because Greenland is a big focus of the plot, and as anyone who knows about my admiration for the Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie will realise, Greenland is a place that particularly captures my imagination. (Indeed, 2025 promises to bring some exciting news on that front – watch this space!)
Kim Leine’s award-winning and bestselling The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, translated by Martin Aitken, tells the story of Morten Falch, an eighteenth-century Danish missionary who travels to Greenland to spread the gospel to the Inuit. Ambitious and earnest, yet riddled with doubts and secret desires (and fixated on Rousseau’s observation that ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’), Falch finds himself tested in the colony’s harsh physical and social climate. Principles crumble in the face of insurmountable inequalities, corruption and human frailty, with gut-wrenching results.
This is a truly absorbing novel. One of those rare fat books you wish was even longer. The writing is at heart of this. There is a wonderful dexterity to Leine and Aitken’s prose, which takes us inside Morten’s most intimate thoughts (as well as those of a number of characters he encounters), laying bare his blind spots, idiosyncracies, vulnerabilities and desires.
Part of the work’s power comes from the attention to detail and physical sensations. The writing excels at delineating the minute shifts in power dynamics that accompany crucial moments and decisions, showing how easily things might turn in another direction, and yet simultaneously making us feel the inevitability of what transpires.
The most powerful example of this involves a protracted rape scene, which shows the ebb and flow of control, and captures the absurdity, humanity and even wrongheaded moments of tenderness, humour and connection in the midst of the cruelty and brutality being inflicted. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as it feels,’ the attacker tells their victim at one point, revealing the self-deception underlying all the worst suffering depicted in the book. Leine presents a powerful anatomy of objectification, showing the way skewed power dynamics warp thinking, feeding off our struggle to conceive of others as having interior lives that are as rich and nuanced as our own.
Interestingly, the book starts with a brief translator’s note, explaining that using the third person pronoun to address someone was a feature of polite discourse in eighteenth-century Danish and that Aitken has chosen to retain it in the English version. This feels like a risky decision – distancing and potentially confusing. Yet Aitken makes it work, establishing a new variant of formal speech that quickly feels natural to the world of the novel. This and the numerous virtuosic descriptions and assertions often couched in deceptively simple terms are testament to the skill of this writer-translator pair.
Take my favourite line, used to describe an infested mattress on the ship on which Morten sails: ‘The lice seep forth like water.’ How horrifyingly marvellous is that? It captures the action so simply and so precisely. You can see the lice rising out of the fibres. It is absolutely the right formulation to bring that moment to life. And if I sat at my desk for half a year it would never occur to me.
And of course it is in this ingenuity, this care, this attention to detail, that the hope of this majestic novel lies. Because although he depicts characters enchained by their own perspectives and desires, Leine reveals by the world he creates for us that we can transcend our small, partial viewpoints. We can look further, we can feel beyond the boundaries of our own experience. The best storytelling allows us to to do this. And it is by making this possible that books like The Prophets of Eternal Fjord live beyond their moment.
And so I come to the end of my year of reading nothing new for this blog. What have I learnt? Well, although my other writing projects and work chairing events at literature festivals mean I haven’t been able only to read books published pre-2021, turning down the volume on the hype around newly published works over the past twelve months has proved instructive.
There are many books that make a big splash when they appear and there are others that echo more loudly with the passing of the years. Sometimes there is a correlation between the two, as with The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. But often books that are big when they come out fall away in time: many of the literary stars of previous eras are barely remembered now.
While big publishers have a fair bit of influence over which titles are visible at first, it is readers who dictate what will be remembered and what will speak beyond its moment. It is the books that stay with us, that we continue to recommend and return to that will live on.
This is exciting and encouraging. It means we all have a say in shaping our literary culture. And it means that small presses that don’t have the marketing fire power of the big houses may still produce work that finds a large audience and reverberates down the years.
Thanks to everyone who has shared their suggestions of older books that stay with them this year. Here’s to many more wonderful literary encounters (and a possible trip to Greenland) in 2025!
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Atlantic Books, 2016)
Back in March 2012, when I posted about my Togolese pick for my year of reading the world, I said that Tété-Michel Kpomassie was the writer I would most like to meet. Little did I know then that, almost exactly a decade later, I would be speaking to him.
Yesterday, however, I got to realise my dream (virtually at least) and spent 40 minutes talking to the intrepid explorer, whose extraordinary journey across the world to live with the Inuit in the 1960s has long been an inspiration for me.
The call came about after I heard the wonderful news that Kpomassie’s groundbreaking memoir, An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, was being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a new afterword, translated by Ros Schwartz. When Penguin contacted me about it, I seized the opportunity to ask to speak with the great man, who is now 80 and lives in France.
It turned out to be one of the most joyful, thrilling and thought-provoking conversations of my life. I was humbled to hear Kpomassie say that he saw parallels between our quests because they both came out of a desire to push beyond received notions and meet the world on our own terms. And my delight knew no bounds when, holding up the beautiful new English-language edition of his book, I saw Kpomassie raise a copy of my novel, Beside Myself, in reply.
We covered many things. I asked Kpomassie how he maintained so much energy and enthusiasm after living with the aftermath of his life-defining journey for so many decades. ‘It’s easy,’ he told me. ‘I am still the same person.’
He went on to explain that, for him, the extraordinary adventure he began as a teenager has always had the quality of a mission – a calling entrusted to him by the surprising collision of many factors (the appearance of the python that gave him his fear of snakes; the baffling presence of a book about Greenland in a shop in rural Togo; the fact that his six years of education gave him just enough French to understand the text and conceive his ambition to run away to this treeless, snake-free land).
A big part of this mission involves opening up the minds of young Africans to the wider world. ‘I think Africans should learn many languages and travel,’ he told me. But he is clear that this must work both ways. There should be greater prominence for and celebration of African culture internationally.
For Kpomassie, language is central to this. ‘We have more than 100 languages in Togo, yet if a young boy can’t speak French perfectly, he cannot succeed. That’s ridiculous,’ he told me, going on to say that it was similarly outrageous that African nations are among the few that don’t speak their own languages when they go to international conventions such as those at the UN.
He would like to see a Pan-African language chosen as the continent’s lingua franca – whether Swahili, Wolof or another widely spoken tongue. This, he says, would play a powerful role in evening up international relations and cultural exchange: people around the world would learn it in much the same way as many European languages are studied, thereby opening up opportunities for African linguists and translators.
The point, he stressed, was to be respectful and evenhanded. ‘No culture is better than another.’
Kpomassie has seen firsthand the damage favouring one culture over another can do. He still remembers the outrage and confusion the European missionaries caused when they tried to convince his father to abandon seven of his eight wives and marry one in a Christian ceremony, an action that would have spelled disaster for many of his brothers and sisters, and could have started a feud with neighbouring villages.
Yet it wasn’t until he reached Greenland that the extent of the wrongs done by colonial evangelism became clear to Kpomassie. ‘They changed the words [of the Lord’s Prayer] to “Give us this day our daily seal”,’ he told me. ‘But no-one gives you a seal at minus 40 degrees. You have to work really hard for it. I realised then that “Give us this day our daily bread” was a lie used to control us.’
Different though they were in so many ways, Kpomassie found parallels between the animism of the Inuit and the traditional beliefs of his community. There was a respect for nature and a sense of oneness with the environment that he found lacking in many European settlers, who made handbags out of the pythons that were sacred to locals in Togo.
This is one of the reasons that, as he writes in the afterword of the new edition of Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland, on some level, he never really left Greenland. And it is why he will move back there later this year. After a lecture tour, he plans to live out his days reading and writing in the country that won his heart more than 50 years ago. ‘This time,’ he says, ‘I will not return.’
In the 16 months or so since I finished my year of reading the world, I’ve been delighted to hear how the project continues to generate interest and have unexpected consequences. From booklovers discovering stories they would never have otherwise found to other readers being inspired to take on similar quests, it’s great to know that my little adventure has encouraged people around the planet to engage with books in new ways.
So you can imagine my delight when, a little while ago, I received a message from film producer Genevieve Lemal. Having worked on such notable movies as Coco Before Chanel and a forthcoming adaptation of Madame Bovary, as well as numerous French-language films, Lemal is always looking for stories that might work well on the big screen.
She’d heard about Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenlandwhen she read an article about my project in The Atlantic a few months ago, and decided to take a closer look at the book. Just as I did, she fell in love with the writer’s account of his teenage escape from the clutches of a python cult in rural Togo and amazing journey up through Africa and Europe to live with the Inuit in Greenland.
Lemal liked the story so much, in fact, that she thought it would make a good film and was in talks with Kpomassie’s French publisher to secure the rights. If all went well, she hoped to be able to invite me to the premiere a few years hence.
A month or so later she was back in touch: she’d been to Paris and met Kpomassie, who is now in his seventies and lives just outside the city. He was an astonishing character, she said, full of stories about his adventures – he even recounted an extraordinary conversation he’d had with his grandfather when he returned to Togo, in which he struggled to explain all that he had seen and done because his mother tongue, Mina, has no word for ‘snow’. I was very jealous as, as I mentioned in my post on his book, Kpomassie is the writer I would most like to meet in the world, so Lemal generously said that if I was coming to Paris I should let her know and perhaps we could all meet up.
A few messages further on and a deal has been struck and a scriptwriter engaged, and Lemal is looking forward to going scouting for locations in Greenland. As she warns me, it will be a long time before the film is ready for screening. Nevertheless, I can’t help being very excited. It’s brilliant to think that Kpomassie’s wonderful story has a chance to reach even more of the world. I look forward to shaking his hand on the red carpet when that day comes.
Picture showing Tété-Michel Kpomassie signing a copy of his book at a student event by Stundentersamfunnet Bergen.
I knew I had to read Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s book as soon as I saw his Wikipedia entry. Being forced to join a snake cult after a childhood run-in with a jungle python would be more than enough of a life story for most people. But then to set yourself the goal of running away to Greenland after you found a book on the place and saw that it had no snakes and no trees in which they might hide? And to succeed? I had to find out more.
I was more than a little apprehensive, though. In my experience, people who have extraordinary tales to tell are often terrible at putting them across, the bravado and impulsiveness required for having adventures not usually sitting well with the diligence and reflection required for good writing.
Luckily, Kpomassie proved to be an exception: not only is An African in Greenland, his account of his ten-year odyssey to meet and live with ‘the little men of the North’, told with warmth, humour and humanity, it is also exceptionally skilfully written (it won the 1981 Prix Litteraire Francophone).
Having travelled his way up through Africa and Europe, learning languages as he went by correspondence courses and working in whatever jobs he could find, Kpomassie has the talent for looking at any society he finds himself in with an outsider’s eyes. This pays dividends when it comes to describing the customs of his tribe in Togo — where the second-born twin is considered senior because he or she sends the first one out as a scout, where chickens are used in healing rituals, and where teenage boys find extraordinary uses for desiccated lizards — and in Greenland.
At times, Kpomassie’s descriptions of the widespread promiscuity and alcoholism he discovered in southern Greenland and the reactions of the Inuits to the ‘first black man’ to visit them are startlingly frank. Open and ready to think the best of those he encounters, despite his early traumas with the python worshippers, Kpomassie describes the world with enthusiasm and honesty, revealing many of its marvels and flaws.
Yet the book is a testament not only too Kpomassie’s positivity and determination and the wonder of the world but to the warmth of humankind. In fact, his descriptions of the many spontaneous offers of accommodation, help and support he received during his journey remind me of the generosity I’m repeatedly encountering from book lovers around the globe as I pursue this project to read a book from every country in the world this year. The book and the extraordinary story it tells are proof that with energy, hope and a little bit of luck, almost anything is possible.
Tété-Michel, I don’t know where your travels are taking you now, but if you’re ever passing through south London dinner’s on me.
An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (translated from the French by James Kirkup). Publisher (this edition): New York Review Books (2001)
