Winter comes but nearly all the year to the city of Tromsø, a wind-lashed port standing precariously on the western coast of Norway, 69.7 degrees North - beyond the Arctic Circle. The inhabitants are proud of their small city, inaccurately called the 'Paris of the North' or, more realistically, 'the Gateway to the Arctic'. It's a quiet place, bleached by the cold, where everything flaunts its latitude, from the Arctic Hotel to the Arctic Cathedral. The landscape is beautiful and severe: vast grey slabs of rock slamming into the ocean, decorated with swirls of thick mist and dustings of snow. It's dark most of the time, and when the sun does appear, it's an anaemic blur, too sickly to drag itself above the horizon for long.

LRB 31 October 2002 | PDF Download