Learning to love the cold

I owe to Librarything the information that Barbara Wilson, whose lively and entertaining crime novels I so enjoyed (if you haven't met them, try Gaudi Afternoon, is now Barbara Sjoholm, author of various travel books, including The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland. There's nothing that consoles me for winter weather, and treacherous snow on the streets, so much as reading about real winter, serious cold, unmelting ice, so this sounded like just the book I needed right now, and to celebrate my new scanner, here's a taster. Returning to the Ice Hotel, a couple of years after her first visit, and this time as a guest rather than to observe its construction, Sjoholm finds adjacent to the hotel an ice theatre, an Ice Globe:( Long quotation under the cut )

She lays out all the cards: straightforward journalistic interview, enchantment at the beauty of the scene, a sly delight at the preposterousness of the entire enterprise = and then gathers them up with a conjuror's sleight of hand and throws them down in a different configuration. The performance is in the Sami language, the actors are Sami, the enterprise offers something unique to the wealthy and cultured tourists, but also gives Sami culture a new visibility, and Sjoholm is alive to all the ambivalence of the buying and selling game that is the tourist industry.

She is also the first person I have ever read who manages to convey, under all the interest and the beauty of what she sees, how cold it is all the time.