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(More customer reviews)Observe Rockwell Kent's hand-printed notes on the Frontispiece, and you will see the legend: "This is Salamina -- apparently hanging out nothing but a clothes pin. If I had given her wash it would have covered up her hands. She always tried to cover them, for they were working hands. This book permits of no concealment."
The book, thus launched in truth, combines Kent's pen and ink chapter-head sketches, full-length portraits of native friends, and engaging text that transport the reader through the icy climes of Greenland in a year-long adventure beginning in 1931. Along the way, Kent describes the hospitality of Greenlanders, which he found humbling and at times frustrating. Readers will discover that many of his stories hold a chuckle or two, if not a good belly-laugh. Salamina, his widowed housekeeper, is the heroine, but main figures in the book are people who gave to him and stole from him. The book is social anthropology, crisply and entertainingly served, of a people and their ways, now gone forever.
The Foreword by Kent-archivist Scott R. Ferris anticipates your first question. Ferris quotes two reviewers when the book first appeared in 1935: Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Salamina "has in it a moving sense of wonder of the virgin universe, the dignity of mountains and of sea, and a rarely intimate picture of Greenlanders at play." A review for The New Yorker opined Kent's "style is abrupt, rhapsodic, hearty . . . it is good anthropology and even better adventure narrative." Said Ferris: "This is why Kent's sagas continue to be reissued."
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First published in 1935, Salamina details artist and adventurer Rockwell Kent's second trip to Greenland. Salamina unfolds as a series of vivid vignettes, each illustrated with Kent's bold black and white drawings. Through his accounts of fishing trips and Christmas festivities, shared meals and budding friendships, Kent acquaints us with the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the small vibrant community of Igdlorssuit. Both the native people and the forbidding Arctic landscape held a special beauty for Kent, and he describes them with an artist's eye. Salamina is Kent's Eskimo housekeeper (kifak), who becomes a central figure in the book when she and her daughter come to share Kent's small hut for the year. Kent's wry self-reflection and his poetic meditations on nature, humanity and love make this an enduring classic of travel literature and artistic quest. This Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by art historian Scott R. Ferris that highlights the cultural importance of the text and illustrations and shows that for Kent, inspiration comes from life.
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