Greenland, the curse of an entire generation

In contrast to what happens to other places that are at once remote but included in tourist routes, for most Italians the experience of Greenland passes almost exclusively through narrative. As she explores Nordic imagery through a range of cultural references, Peter Davidson single-handedly describes it idea northas a “strong” idea, which shows a difference in North Strange.

long addiction Denmark’s Greenlandic politics made it easier – in forms today rapidly moving toward difficult autonomy – to mediate its culture, although Danish is also a peripheral language, creating at the same time an advantage and a limitation. Some bits of knowledge have come down to us from the ethnographic work of giants like Knud Rasmussen, or from the accounts of authors who lived on this big island, including Jorn Riel who told us contradictory stories, or Kim Line who described it in his book ‘Eternal Fjord’; While from Peter Hoeg’s famous novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, we often derive invented images: not even a corner of Greenland is among those that appear in the novel.

Christine Thisted, a scholar of the cultural geography of the Arctic countries, invites us to distinguish between Danish works in Greenland and books written by natives in their mother tongue and then translated, of which we have a few examples in Italy: Now, to incorporate the bibliography, the remarkable novel by Neviak Corneliussen, Valley of Flowers (Translation and epilogue by Francesca Torre, Iberborea, p. 298, Euro 18.50). In his early thirties and bilingual, as is Greenland in general, Korneliussen won the Scandinavian Council Prize in 2021 for this work which addresses the problem of suicide, especially among young people, and which constitutes a sad record for Greenland in international statistics.

hiring Between the capital Nuuk, where the protagonist seems to find a kind of balance thanks to the love of her companion, the Danish city of Aarhus, where she tries with limited success to cope with university studies, and Tasselq, a small town on the east coast, the novel is at the same time a means of social denunciation, which highlights the lack of help for the most troubled children, and an impressive narrative takes place with the most troubled person.
Korneliussen neither ignores the historical rooting of suicide in Greenland—once used among the elderly now useless to society—nor trivializes the unacceptable subject matter of the problem, and transforms these socially necessary themes into a novel that unleashes unprecedented power and sensitivity.

The Valley of Flowers in the title is the name of a small cemetery in Tasiilaq, where the protagonist reflects on the desolation of an entire generation deprived of its legitimate aspirations. The description of the graves, while realizing its symbolic value, overlaps almost to the letter with the narrative representation given to us by Simona Vinci from the same place, between the pages of Nel bianco: a cemetery without tombstones, with large white crosses and figures, colored plastic flowers, without names and without dates, because suicides are silent and “everyone knows who their dead are”.