I have a category for novels that I have loved to pieces that don't get the attention they deserve. (If you are curious go to https://www.librarything.com/catalog/... . ) All of these novels share a few features to one degree or another: balance (between dark and light, humor and sadness, good and bad etcetera). Bad things happen, but they are part of a flow of events and fit into them with nothing remotely titillating. The humor is often more on the understated or ironic side. Like a painting you feel you could step into (I don't mean hyper-realism) but something about the images that draw you in. So the second piece, related but a little different, is authenticity (I know, I know, kind of a dangerous word, too vague) but what I mean by that is that the writer convinces me that he or she has channeled (sorry again) something real. Miller has entered this territory. Sven is fictional but Sven is also as real as you or me, lives in the world.

And what a world! Fascinated by the colder regions of the earth, and unable to find a place for himself in Sweden, Sven goes to Spitzbergen (now named Svalbard) in the second decade of the 20th century to work in a mine. He is injured, his face scarred, vision compromised, but he stays and by staying slowly builds a life that suits him--not that he is ever a man entirely comfortable inside his own skin--he learns to live in and love this harsh environment and makes deep friendships --some very surprising! Quite often I cannot abide a first person narrative for long, but in this case, the voice if Sven is always always welcome. Sven has dogs, loves and understands then, and Miller's dogs are authentic too. ***** ( )

Submitted by Lisa

This is a fictionalized memoir of a man, Sven, who may have actually lived. He goes to the Artic to change his life and to find solitude. But the crux of the story is about the people and the dogs that he meets that help him and the impact these relationships have on him. In reviews, the writing is particularly noted.

Perfection. ( )

Miller picks up a small thread of history and weaves a credible story of survival, resilience, and friendship in the harsh Arctic environment of remote Svalbard. The male dominated frontier mining village of Longyearbyen and Pyramiden, punctuated by the ever-present yet typically kind sex workers are a counterpoint to the isolation of winter life trapping and surviving on a more remote, more northerly fjord. What I missed were the details of weather, of setting traps, of skinning and preparing felts, of overcoming the daily repetitions. But the friendships -- with a fellow isolated trapped, with a geologist with books and a big heart in Longyearbyen, and an unstable and willful niece who shows up with an infant daughter one fall -- are the true heart of the story. ( )

Who among us hasn’t at one time - typically as a child - dreamt of running off to the woods (or the mountains, or the sea) in search of solitude and adventure, a la My Side of the Mountain or Redburn? In this tale, the protagonist is Sven the Swede, an educated but misanthropic young man, raised by disinterested parents for a life destined to involve hard work in the company of people he disdains. Raised on tales of arctic exploration, he fixates on the idea that a life in the arctic will provide him the solitude and spiritual solace that he craves. But of course it’s not as easy as that, because as tempting as it may sometimes seem, one can’t actually run away from life because life follows you wherever you go.

Approached this with trepidation because “man vs. nature” tales aren’t my cup of tea. I couldn't care less about the miseries of frostbite, the care and feeding of sled dogs, or how to recognize different types of snow. (I had an unfortunate encounter with Jack London in my youth that left some scars.) But though there are some beautiful descriptive passages here and plenty of physical hardship, this tale was – to my great relief - focused on the interactions between humans, with the arctic standing in as a metaphor for all the forces in the world – culture, hardship, misfortune, societal expectations, introversion, resentment, frustration, lovelessness – that can isolate us from the world if we allow them to. This isn’t a tale about how to survive in the arctic – instead, it’s challenging us question any preconceived notions we might have about “what constitutes happiness?” and “what constitutes a worthy life?”

The story is filled with realistic detail and feels satisfyingly authentic, as long as you don’t think too hard. Because the argument could be made that Sven is improbably lucky in the acquaintances (human and canine) he makes along the way, each of them engagingly eccentric and unfailingly generous. But the advantage of fiction over non-fiction is that the author gets to create the story they want to tell, and this is a story worth telling. One by one, these eccentrics teach Sven how to reengage with the world on his own terms, how to trust, and ultimately how to love.

I’m grateful for the reminder that lives don't have to be "big" to be important, that it isn't the number of connections that you make in this life that matter but rather the quality of those connections, and that each of us needs to be allowed to define "happiness" in our own way. ( )