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A review by trulybooked
Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter
3.0
There is a lyrical and poetic dreaminess to this memoir, but I think that might work against it. I thought that I was going to be getting more of an adventure story, but instead there's a quiet and introspective trip with little danger.
The dream-like nature of the prose means that even when there's a potential polar bear attack and an ice emergency, it never feels hurried or like there's any real danger. To be fair to Kathleen Winter, she does admit that was how it felt to be there. She never felt the danger because the crew she was with were so experienced.
I also got lost with the internal reckoning of colonialism and how it fits with the rest of the novel. It feels out of place. It's the Showgirls problem where the work that's trying to draw attention to issues ends up exemplifying them. While calmly decrying colonialism and how we continue to perpetuate it on one page. Then on the next page, it speaks of the souvenirs and the way she wanted to know the names of the people who sold it and take pictures with them.
It's hard to say where the line is here, but I can at the very least say that the writing is beautiful and Kathleen Winter feels genuine and like she has the best of intentions.
The dream-like nature of the prose means that even when there's a potential polar bear attack and an ice emergency, it never feels hurried or like there's any real danger. To be fair to Kathleen Winter, she does admit that was how it felt to be there. She never felt the danger because the crew she was with were so experienced.
I also got lost with the internal reckoning of colonialism and how it fits with the rest of the novel. It feels out of place. It's the Showgirls problem where the work that's trying to draw attention to issues ends up exemplifying them. While calmly decrying colonialism and how we continue to perpetuate it on one page. Then on the next page, it speaks of the souvenirs and the way she wanted to know the names of the people who sold it and take pictures with them.
It's hard to say where the line is here, but I can at the very least say that the writing is beautiful and Kathleen Winter feels genuine and like she has the best of intentions.