From: rsquires@cyclops.eece.unm.edu (Roger Squires)
Subject: Review:  _Kabloona_, by Gontran de Poncins
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 92 16:32:12 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque


Kabloona
Jean-Pierre Gontran de Montaigne de Poncins,
in collaboration  with Lewis Galantiere

	Whether it was a photograph in a shop-window that had first
     prompted me, or a chance remark negligently dropped in my
     hearing, I do not now remember nor does it much signify.  I
     know only that some time before that spring day the word
     Eskimo had rung inside me and that the sound had begun to
     swell like the vibrations of a great bell and had eventually
     filled the whole of my subconscious being.  I had not been
     possessed instantly by a conscious and urgent need to go
     into the Artic and live with a primitive people.  These
     things operate slowly, like the germ of a cancer.  They
     brood within, they send out tentacles and grow.  Their first
     effect is not decision but restlessness.  You find yourself
     feeling that something is obscurely yet radically wrong with
     your life.  You fidget.  . . . your friends seem to you more
     and more to be talking nonsense, leading a meaningless
     existence, content with a frivolity and a mediocrity to
     which you find yourself superior. . . . Finally there comes
     a moment when you waken in the middle of the night and lie
     still, eyes wide open in the dark.  Life, you sense, is
     about to change.  Something is about to happen.  And it
     happens:  you have made your decision.

Well, even if you couldn't give a pin about Eskimos, you'll
thoroughly enjoy this 1941 Book-of-the-Month-Club selection about
life with these nomadic peoples in the far North.  In 1938, de
Poncins, "the epitome of elegant but undirected dilettantism,"
after several unsuccessful attempts at traditional careers spent
a year wandering through the South Seas in admiration of
something in these simpler cultures seemingly lacking in his own,
became interested in ethnology, and soon found himself in the
Canadian Arctic.  This book is the condensation of some 1200
pages of half French, half English diaries to 300 full of
entertainment and insight into life in a "Stone Age culture" with
the help of collaborator Galantiere.

Six months after first asking the bishop of the Artic diocese of
the Oblate Fathers for a plane ride north of Edmonton, followed
by long delays and a ride on the good ship Audrey B., de Poncins
found himself at the Hudson's Bay post at Perry River, followed
by a motorboat trip to his final destination, Gjoa Haven on King
William Land, quite close to the North magnetic pole (his trips
into and out of the Artic Circle are much more fully covered in
the book _The Ghost Voyage_, 1954).

Through journeys to nearby Eskimo fish camps and settlements, we
go with the author as he tells us about his reactions to the
landscape, the daily life of the people, and their relationships
with each other and with him.  Winter approaches, and he travels
with a family on their cyclic and seasonal journey, after the ice
becomes too thick to fish, onto the frozen sea to hunt seal and
polar bear.  After some time living at the Post among the 25 or
so 'half-civilised' people of the 10,000 square miles of King
William Land, de Poncins traveled another 200 miles to visit the
'truly primitive Eskimos' farther east at Pelly Bay (he tells us
that of over 1500 miles on the trail, he walked a good 1400),
before finally taking his leave of Canada around the turn of
spring and the return of the caribou.

You learn many things in this book:  The author's reaction to the
bare and magnificent landscape and harsh weather, the Eskimo's
daily routine, the tools and hunting techniques they use in the
never-ending search for food (50 pounds a day for a family and
dogs), what life in an igloo is like, etc.  But mostly this book
is about Gontran's reaction to, and his attempt to get inside the
head of, this enigmatic people, so strange to his modern European
eyes:
	For the first time in my life, I found myself face to face
     with a human being who disconcerted me beyond explanation. 
     He spoke no word.  No current flowed between him and me.  I
     could not say what this was that sat there before me. . . .
     The grin itself of this Eskimo was nonhuman, might have been
     the facial contortion of a fox staring at the sun, an animal
     reflex.  I was nonplussed.
From an initial 'outsider' feeling at being tauntingly referred
to by the Eskimos as a Kabloona (white man) for his ineptness at
simple tasks and customs, and distaste for their simple-
mindedness and brutish habits (not to mention despair over the
infernal cold (50 below!) and the bleak, amorphous landscape) de
Poncins comes to respect, admire, and finally to absorb some of
the simplicity, discipline, and inner peace he saw in the pure
Eskimos in Pelly Bay.

The book is chock-full of humour and entertaining scenes, with
drawings and photographs by the author.  My favorite drawing is
"An igloo seen from above," with its accompanying captions:
	1.  Old man sitting on the couch (made of snow) and talking
     to himself while nobody listens.  He repeats the same thing
     ten times over, explaining how he saw the polar bear on the
     pack. . . .
	5.  Heap of frozen seals, stored for meat.  If hungry, you
     just bend forward, cut yourself a slice, throw the rest back
     on the heap. . . .
And I'm not sure which was better: the _To Build a Fire_ish scene
where he is alone and lost in a blizzard, or the description of
the shrinking of his mental and physical horizons with the
approach of winter, distinctly reminiscent of the movement of
Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_, and the shrinking of the
protagonist's horizons therein.

I picked this book up mainly because it was published as one of
"The Time Reading Program" series, many volumes of which I got
for pennies on the dollar at the library thrift shop. Among them
are _Napoleon's Russian Campaign_, de Segur; _The Crime of
Galileo_, Santillana; _Naked To Mine Enemies_, Ferguson; _The
Leopard_, Lampedusa (which I've started); all of which look
intriguing, and I think I will write the company and try and get
a list of all the volumes in the series.  In any case, the work
in the present review was thoroughly satisfying in every way, and
I highly recommend it.

rms
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