It seems that Vollman is here eager to make a comment on the ugliness of European colonization of the "New World" and what it did to the innocent indigenous folk they found here, as exemplified, in one vignette, by the Eskimo father who rescues his son from cold-hearted Norse kidnappers in Greenland and then, regrettably, kills the child for fear of contamination which cannot be undone. If only those unenlightened Norse had not meddled with the pristine, good-hearted natives! This book, in the end, is tendentious and tedious and just plain heavy-handed. And, as Gertrude Stein once said of her native town, "there's no there there."

I came to this book because of a bad review I saw of Jane Smiley's Greenlanders (a saga-like novel of the last days of the Norse colony in Greenland) in which the reviewer took Ms. Smiley to task for her prose and urged the interested reader to try Vollman's The Ice Shirt, instead, for a really good rendering of saga material. Well, allow me to attempt to reverse that rather silly judgement here. Smiley did it well; on the other hand, I'm not sure what Mr. Vollman has done. But, at the least, he has not written an historical novel. -- Stuart W. Mirsky swmirsky@usa.net