A Grotesque Historical Novel  The Conquest of Greenland

Franzobel’s latest adventure novel recounts, in satirical fashion, the historic race to the North Pole, while simultaneously depicting the encounter between two cultures that remain alien to one another.

When Franzobel’s novel Hundert Wörter für Schnee (Hundred Words for Snow) was published in February 2025, the timing seemed perfect: the interest in gaining control of Greenland, repeatedly expressed by the American President Donald Trump at the end of 2024 shortly before the start of his second term, appeared to be the best possible marketing. Viewed cynically, the marketing might well have been even better had Franzobel’s book appeared in January 2026, when Trump bolstered his territorial claims with military threats.

By now, Trump’s focus — and with it the attention of the public — has long since shifted elsewhere. Although Franzobel’s novel is not actually about the conquest of Greenland but rather about the historical race to the North Pole, the colonial mindset is unmistakable. At the outset, one polar explorer, Robert Edwin Peary (1856–1920), accuses the other, Frederick Cook (1865–1940), of lying. Both had claimed in 1909 to have been the first to reach the North Pole from Greenland. Both wanted the glory, but as is well known, there can only ever be one winner. Yet is that really the case? In fact, it is likely that neither of them truly reached the Pole.

Treading on an Entire People’s Toes

The novel initially centres on the life of Peary, a man Franzobel portrays as vain, ruthless, and hungry for fame. Peary, he writes, was the kind of person who would never apologise for stepping on someone’s toes — not even after “treading on an entire people’s toes”. This refers to the Inughuit (the name of the inhabitants of northern Greenland), in whose homeland Peary led several expeditions between 1886 and 1909.
Alongside Peary, Franzobel introduces a second main character: the Inughuit boy Minik, who also has a historical counterpart. Minik’s life unfolds tragically. As a child, he is taken to New York by Peary together with five other Greenlanders, to serve as a public attraction at the request of the deputy scientific director of the anthropological department of the American Museum of Natural History. Four of the Indigenous people, subjected to curious stares, die within months from infectious diseases, including Minik’s father. Minik is then adopted by a museum employee who later proves to be rather untrustworthy.

Many years later, Minik discovers that the burial of his deceased relatives had been staged for his benefit. In reality, their skeletons had been put on display in the museum. After this ultimate betrayal — in which his adoptive father played a central role — Minik returns to Greenland in 1909. Yet he no longer feels at home there; he has become too alienated from his roots: “I stand between cultures, I am torn,” Minik says of himself. Although he asked as early as 1911 to be allowed to return to America, his return to the United States did not take place until 1916. There, two years later, he dies of Spanish flu while working as a lumberjack.

Opulently and Readably Told

In Franzobel’s telling, the Inughuit are not merely objects of curiosity; they also cast a critical gaze on Western and American culture. Bothe sides consider the other exotic and backward. Yet the Indigenous people are not idealised either, for they too have brutal rituals: “When twins were born, the weaker was killed because two could not be fed. If both parents died before a child’s third birthday, the child was strangled.” Things take a grotesque turn when a Greenlander offers Peary and his accompanying wife Josephine a customary wife-swapping arrangement. When the couple indignantly reject the proposal, they are offered a delicacy instead: a piece of walrus meat “that had been buried in the frozen ground for a year and now exuded a cheesy tang”.
Franzobel casts a satirical eye on the colonial mindset in his novel and does not shy away from puns and bawdy jokes. He is a sensuous, at times even brutal storyteller, for whom the unrestrained enjoyment of elaborating his ideas matters more than unreserved approval from literary critics. In the end, this opulently and readably told novel makes one thing clear: the West, as a moral or ethical compass for the rest of the world, is not merely obsolete — it has, outside its own self-image, never functioned as such.

March 2026