Nathaniel Ian Miller

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. *****… (more)

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.… (more)