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“Blizzard”
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Written by Marie Vintras. Translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Abrams/Overlook Press, 2024. 224 pages. $26.
First published in France as a debut novel in 2021, this little book won 12 literary awards in France, including the French Bookseller’s Novel of the Year award. The story is set somewhere in the Alaskan interior and is told from the perspective of four characters every few pages. The story begins when a woman and a young boy, new to Alaska, leave their home and disappear into a storm. A man living in the house searches for them with the help of his neighbors. Two of his characters are white men who have lived their entire lives in Alaska. One is an elderly African American Vietnam War veteran who recently arrived.
Readers who were expecting a dramatic story involving a snowstorm will be disappointed. After the first few pages, there’s little to describe what it’s like to get lost in a winter storm or search through it. Perhaps the blizzard may be best understood as a metaphor for the characters’ life situations, the breadth of detail and ambiguity of history that characterize them.
There are certainly mysteries. Who are these people, to themselves and to each other? Why do they live in a remote settlement in Alaska? In each chapter, the characters dive deeper into the story. Almost all backstories are about their previous lives. Along the way, they learn that each has experienced some kind of trauma and each has a secret.
An even bigger mystery may be why this novel is so popular in France. French readers seem to be attracted to dark and violent stories. (Readers may remember that David Vann’s 2008 collection of stories set in Alaska, The Legend of Suicide, was a big hit in France and won some of the same awards as Blizzard. ) The story here is unconvincing and the prose is as follows. Inconspicuous. Each character speaks in their own voice. This explains the use of clichés, but it does little to distinguish one voice from another. As with any translated work, it is difficult for the reader to tell whether inaccuracies or wooden prose belong to the original or the translation.
I doubt the French author ever set foot in Alaska or anywhere in the North, but another mystery is why she chose to place her story in an environment she had no experience with. . (Although the translator thanked the Alaskans for their “invaluable help” in a memo, there is no evidence that the author received such help.) , uses the usual metaphor of “nature, wideness.” – squares,” log cabins, “huts” and “barracks,” trappers and “big game,” bastards, snow (of course), “plenty of fish,” ice floes, “always cold” even in summer, and—the most interesting of all: , a crevasse. “Crevasse” is a French word meaning “crack in a glacier or snowfield,” but some dictionaries also define it as a deep, narrow opening in rock. Although there are no glaciers or snowfields in the area during the “blizzard,” children are warned to stay away from crevasses. It is revealed at the end that it is a rocky area (obviously not covered in snow) that makes up the crevasse. In any case, “crevasses” are mentioned throughout the book more than any other local feature.
All in all, it takes some effort to imagine the author’s setting. It’s a very remote place (“nobody to answer to, probably not a soul to be seen for weeks”), with only a few houses, but a road that attracts summer tourists. It is “land where no trees could grow,” but elsewhere there are references to trees and references to closed sawmills. People are walking through the storm wearing normal shoes. One falls when a character trips on a stump and tumbles “downhill like a snowball,” and another character then says, “There’s fresh powder halfway up my thighs.” The animals mentioned are dogs, moose (European moose), and Steller’s sea eagle.
Why on earth would someone walk aimlessly through a storm without checking the building for a missing 10-year-old child or calling out his name? This is just one early example of a plot that still doesn’t make sense.
Returning to the question “Why Alaska?” The author seems to have decided that Alaska is the perfect place to find a bunch of misfits, murderers, and rapists. Several times the characters comment on themselves and each other as being too stupid, uncivilized, and underequipped to live in other parts of the world, and why anyone with a brain would want to live in Alaska. I have doubts about whether I will live there. Regarding the female characters, she says, “Few women would try to make a life for themselves in a land so harsh that only men can endure it.” One is his partner, who turns out to be a violent misogynist who thinks rape is a perfectly acceptable behavior.
Blizzard is, above all, a quick read, an opportunity to think deeply about how different readers respond to a book differently, and an easy read for those unfamiliar with our homeland. It reminds us that we can be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
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