The books that explain why everyone wants Greenland
Trump and co like to imagine the Arctic as empty, silent and ripe for the taking. In fact it is noisy, political and increasingly angry
In a grim sort of way, Donald Trump could be said to have put Greenland on the 21st century’s mental map. As the US president threatens to militarily seize it or to buy it, by hook or by crook, the world has learned a bit about the world’s largest island, a Danish autonomous territory with a capital called Nuuk.
But two books published last year after Trump’s return to the White House give insight into some of the reasons that the ice-covered island has often been coveted.
Meanwhile, it takes an American poet’s lyrical chronicle of the Greenlandic landscape and the lives of its people to find out the Inuit have a couple dozen words for ice, cook a celebratory dish of auks sewn into seal bellies, still travel by dogsled and kayak and really really like being in the dark four months a year.
And just when you think Greenland is a world away from anywhere else on the planet, a novel set in Nuuk strikes a reassuring note. It turns out that it has many of the same social issues as everywhere else, not least angst-ridden youth plagued by messy relationships and self-doubt.
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Rashmee Roshan Lall’s Substack This Week Those Books explains current affairs by recommending books by experts
