Authors Interviewing Characters: Cynthia Reeves
Cynthia Reeves’s novel The Last Whaler is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway. The Last Whaler touches on many themes, including a meditation on human motivation. The following is an imaginary interview between the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten and Tor Handeland that captures some of his thoughts in this regard.
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Aftenposten interview with the whaler Tor Handeland:
“One can never fully explain one’s motivations” | 10 September 1947
Aftenposten: You managed to avoid the war’s destruction, safe on your dairy farm in Sandefjord. Your family is starting to put the war and the tragedies of the last decade behind you. Why, then, did you return to Svalbard?
Tor: Can we ever put tragedies behind us? I had thought so. That’s one reason why I returned. Another is that I wanted to see with my own eyes the destruction the Germans wrought on Svalbard. Safe on the farm, as you say, we insulated ourselves from the worst of the war. But we couldn’t simply move on. I couldn’t. The scars are everywhere. Svalbard shows me this every day as I clear debris and raise a building where the ghost of an old structure had been. And the worst scars are those you can’t see. I’ve learned that—the hard way.
Aftenposten: How so?
Tor: I used to believe that everything one chooses to do has a rational explanation. I see now that this kind of thinking blinds you to motivations that may be—are—inexplicable.
Aftenposten: Can you give me an example?
Tor: I find the war a puzzle of human motivation. What would possess a man to pursue what Hitler pursued? I simply don’t understand that inhuman desire for power and the evils that attend to attaining it. Something long buried in the psyche, perhaps, even something the person doesn’t understand?
Aftenposten: Not all motivations are rooted in evil, however inexplicable they may be.
Tor: Of course you’re right. The polar explorers’ obsession with mapping was part of the human longing to make the unknown known. Still, there’s a great deal of hubris involved: The hubris of thinking everything—land, animal, plant, rock—can be catalogued and exploited. That Earth can someday be fully known. That every square inch can be plotted, every image rendered, every unseen force explained. And then? Well, then there’s what lies beyond this puny planet—the vastness of space. The quest for knowledge is as infinite as space.
Aftenposten: Which brings us back to why you came to Svalbard in the first place. Surely beluga whaling wasn’t so profitable that it was worth the risk?
Tor: If only I had known then what I know now…One can never fully explain one’s motivations, I don’t think. Svalbard beckoned with its promise of natural resources—coal, gypsum, whales, fish, game. I wasn’t the first to be lured by money. But I also thought myself a pioneer. I arrived on a pristine shore with my whaling crew and a new world at my feet, frozen though they were! And deep down, if I’m honest, I enjoyed the summer’s respite from the tedium of farming and the strictures of family life, knowing that my wife and her parents could manage the farm on their own.
Aftenposten: Was that freedom worth the cost?
Tor: Let me tell you my story, and you be the judge.
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Cynthia Reeves—About the Author
Cynthia Reeves is the author of the novel The Last Whaler forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in September 2024; the novel in stories Falling through the New World (Gold Wake Press 2024), which was awarded Gold Wake’s Spring 2023 Fiction Prize; and the novella Badlands, which won Miami University Press’s 2006 Novella Prize. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have been widely published. Most recently, her story “The Last Glacier” appears in the anthology If the Storm Clears (Blue Cactus Press 2024). She has been awarded residencies to The Arctic Circle’s 2017 and 2024 Expeditions, Hawthornden Castle, Galleri Svalbard, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program. Find out more at cynthiareeveswriter.com. Follow her on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews, On Writing
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