Non-fiction: Maria Coffey: Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow (Hutchinson, 2003)
After reading so much Antarctic literature, I started to feel that they all drew their inspiration from a very limited canon of sources, the same canon I’m going through now. The same references come up all the time. To combat this, a friend suggested I [...]

I was helping a friend move his stuff yesterday, and got electrocuted. His house has an old elevator, one with a double door made of metal mesh you can see through. A cupboard was two centimeters too big for the inner door to close, and the elevator wouldn’t move. I didn’t want to carry it [...]

Fiction: J.M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello (Secker & Warburg, 2003)
I actually started to read this book to get a break from the endless procession of books about Antarctica. I was surprised, and somewhat dismayed, when it turns out that I can’t get out so easily; Antarctica is featured in this novel too, although only as background. [...]

Non-fiction: Tom Avery: Pole Dance (Orion, 2004)
First off, Avery’s book has a great name, a name that makes it stand above the rest in the cluttered field of Antarctic memoirs. It belongs to the genre of modern-day accounts of private expenditions to the South Pole, and describes how Avery and his team walked to the [...]

As New Year’s Eve approached I got increasingly desperate. An old friend had a party coming up. I’d see all the people who’re in Finland only for the holidays. It’d be very comfortable and incestuous.
My brother was feeling much the same. He’s been living abroad so long he didn’t have a party lined up at [...]