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A review by speculativebecky
Sanaaq: An Inuit Novel by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk
4.0
Sanaaq somewhat eschews the definition of the word novel, and would more appropriately be described as a collection of forty eight vignettes about an Inuk woman named Sanaaq and her family and community. The back of the book teases “under it all, the growing intrusion of the Qallunaat and the battle for souls between the Catholic and Anglican missionaries”, as if that’s the major narrative arc of this book, but reading it I found the white man a far less prevalent topic than that blurb suggests. I wonder at that choice of framing and the constant need of white audiences to twist other people’s stories until we are at the center.
Nappaaluk’s writing feels suffused with energy. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book with more exclamation points per page, and I loved it. (Although of course I don’t know how the two translations may have altered the tone of the original work.) The stories are dominated by dialogue, and I was struck by the way that so much of the book’s descriptions were said aloud by its characters within the stories.
In so many ways this book feels unlike anything else I’ve read before, and I’m grateful to Nappaaluk for sharing her writing and illuminating something of her way of life. One of my most needling questions in reading this work was who Nappaaluk was writing for, who is her target audience? And I think the answer to that question is likely not a single answer. At times it felt like the book was providing explanations for an outsider, at others it felt like it was recording to preserve memories and wisdom for the insiders to a community. One illuminating takeaway from the foreword was that one of Nappaaluk’s goals was transcribing terms and grammatical structures from her language to assist with its study, but that she grew bored with just writing sentences and thus created these characters and their stories. Truly a unique and remarkable book.
Nappaaluk’s writing feels suffused with energy. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book with more exclamation points per page, and I loved it. (Although of course I don’t know how the two translations may have altered the tone of the original work.) The stories are dominated by dialogue, and I was struck by the way that so much of the book’s descriptions were said aloud by its characters within the stories.
In so many ways this book feels unlike anything else I’ve read before, and I’m grateful to Nappaaluk for sharing her writing and illuminating something of her way of life. One of my most needling questions in reading this work was who Nappaaluk was writing for, who is her target audience? And I think the answer to that question is likely not a single answer. At times it felt like the book was providing explanations for an outsider, at others it felt like it was recording to preserve memories and wisdom for the insiders to a community. One illuminating takeaway from the foreword was that one of Nappaaluk’s goals was transcribing terms and grammatical structures from her language to assist with its study, but that she grew bored with just writing sentences and thus created these characters and their stories. Truly a unique and remarkable book.