Ultima Thule: A Journey to Spitzbergen

Ultima Thule — the end of the world. This is how people used to refer to Spitsbergen, an island in the northernmost archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. In this book, Simone Sassen and Cees Nooteboom describe a journey there and to the coal mining town Pyramiden, once operated by the Russians. There are romantic views of deserted, almost barren landscapes, high moors, glaciers, mountains, eternal ice, fjords, more than just the north, as it were, and instead the quintessence of the north. Then, like a mirage, the silence of an abandoned town: disused industrial facilities, deserted apartments, a former post office, abandoned playgrounds and sports fields. These traces of a past “gold fever” and of urban life in the eternal ice are both impressive and unreal. Simone Sassen's color photographs and Cees Nooteboorn's essay capture the “end of the world”, as is actually the case in Pyramiden, in a fascinating way. These are images of a past whose shadow stretches far into the future.