Travel Diary in Greenland, Land of Ice and Silence

Writing Bergorgio Casotti Wobbly, Opa, Cronach Greenlandzi (Italo Svevo, 2023, pp. 334, €20) is a book of startling discovery, travel memoir and present-day personality, begun in 2009 and finished writing after ten years of reconnaissance in East Greenland.

The author is a photographer and traveler, in fact the book preserves the visual and summarizing aspects of wonder, the deep sense of observation and vision as a profound form of human knowledge, which has always been the hallmark of narrative reporting. The demon that drives him to go through this experience is the “fear of death” that grips him after the sudden disappearance of his father. We are in a “Wonderful Wasteland”, mysterious and inhospitable, inhabited by only 55,000 Inuit, the largest island in the world where 80 percent of its surface is covered in permafrost, a no-man’s-land “that no one owns”, disputed between Denmark and Norway, which he discovered The author reveals the senses, and shows us through lyrical black and white shots that turn into text and story, and intertwine and resonate with the words.

The writing is direct, natural and very effective, most of the time describing it and never seeking to practice style, it serves to accompany us in these places “left on the margins of the news” that the Reggio Emilia correspondent penetrates by integrating into societies, participating in parties, at weddings, On road trips, getting lost on icy roads, going fishing or hanging out in pubs and talking to people, living in other people’s homes and eventually becoming one of them like all sympathetic storytellers are, expanding on transforming her “Arctic Web”.

The title could not be more apt as Uppa probably means, “the word most used in Tasiilaq and most understood for anything relating to human life in Greenland”. In the book there is a strong element of learning about physical and geographical reality, the fatal allure of “cold, solitude, and silence,” but also the equally important element of a social anthropology bred without psychology but in its existential truth, where “every year nearly 25 percent of young people attempt suicide. And nearly 2% succeed,” which is the highest suicide rate among young people in the world.

In the many voyages of Cassutti, here “summarized in seven chapters-seasons,” he warns in a note, he discovers that during the endless days alcohol flows freely in Klusuk or Tasilac, heavy drinking becomes the only possible escape, and the relations between Family members He experienced a sensation, gripping the bad life in Greenland where many children contemplate suicide, or have already tried to kill themselves several times, “for some children suicide is wonderful, and friends will remember you,” explains Kaley, whom he met Party, one of many people he meets and talks with, while Ollie confesses to him that his mother committed suicide, as well as his uncle, who “shot himself”, and his cousin as well, despite the places in which he lives and the inability to communicate. A symbol in and of itself, “silence between people is more like language than lack of content,” he says.

Piergiorgio Casotti’s life story captivates even as he recounts the most absurd daily life, or when he describes the interiors of houses, the still lifes of apartments, or the many people like Peter the Fisherman, Michael, and Martha who has a scar under her left eye because she shot a herself with a gun, or Gerda, who has been “seen driving around town driving an old pink Volkswagen from the 1960s”, who has opened a bookstore in Zilkie, who, on the contrary, admits to him that she sells few books. He might have expected: ‘They are mainly sold to Danes who live here and a few tourists, but there are a couple of books that were bought by the locals. One is about interpreting dreams and the other is about near-death experiences.” And Tatzi, who reveals to the police office: “Life and death have a different meaning here in Greenland.