Night, the Tourist and the Fury of the Polar Bear

The picture book by Lone Munksgaard and Knud Odde about the fury of Greenland’s nature is in a class of its own and for that reason maybe something for everyone

By Kamilla Löfström
A polar bear is a polar bear, and humans are human, but for all that it is still an overwhelming thought that a female polar bear will lie in a cave for months with her new-born cubs, while they just suck and grow, and the mother gets more and more gaunt and emaciated. The day a polar bear mother can leave the cave for food, it would be best if nothing stood in her way.

Vinden jeg kaldte Isbjørn ('The Wind I called Polar Bear') is about powerful natural forces that are shown to be unleashed by a polar bear’s rage. The story begins with a line of black letters that snake their way in an elegant curve across the wide red-and-yellow sky: ‘A long time ago I travelled to Greenland to look at polar bears, whales and the northern lights.’ The sentence points towards the black shadow of a solitary sailing ship with the same reddish sky as a background. In this way each page is a composition of painting and text. The pictures are collages and watercolours and they often have the strong, black contours so characteristic of Knud Odde. Generally a lot of black is used in the pictures.

Odde avoids on a whole the stereotypical images both of Greenland and of animals as they appear in picture books. No cuddly polar bears here. The hotel room, where the tourist is to spend the night, has a positively Japanese look. The pictures have more the logic of dreams, and this harmonises beautifully with the gripping narrative, which takes place at night and has a mysterious quality.

We can also imagine that the author really did travel to Greenland and did experience a wind so powerful that it was not enough simply to call it wind. The fury of Greenland’s nature had to have a complete story, and that is what it had been given. And a very poetic story it is, about the meeting of a tourist with forces of nature that could come from a polar bear mother which, having lain in the cave with her two cubs, could not come out again because the frost had closed off the opening to the cave with thick ice. The mother and her young starved to death, ‘but her power and her anger found their way out of the cave when the ice disappeared, and since then she has been ravaging the surrounding country.’

The female tourist ends up putting aside her high heels, dressing more sensibly and meeting the mother creature. The two of them find peace together, when the woman calls the wind by name – just as in the fairytales. But above all this picture book is its own special mysterious encounter between the tiny individual and the immensity of nature.

Translated by John Mason