Product Description

'This strange and brilliant book recounts Jenny Diski's journey to Antarctica last year, intercut with another journey into her own heart and soul...a book of dazzling variety, which weaves disquisitions on indolence, truth, inconsistency, ambiguousness, the elephant seal, Shackleton, boredom and over and over again memory, into a sparse narrative, caustic observation and vivid description of the natural world. While Diski's writing is laconic, her images are haunting.' Elspeth Barker, Independent on Sunday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #348483 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Amazon.com
"I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white: white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It's the best I could do."

Jenny Diski's obsession with the cool purity of white began early in life, when as a small child, she was taken for weekly skating lessons at the local ice rink. Between practicing figure eights, she would watch the Zamboni move across the ice scraping away the pitted, blade-scored surface: "It was all taken away in minutes and underneath was pure, untouched surface again, gleaming milky white, virgin, immaculate ice." This gleaming, immaculate ice stands in stark contrast to Diski's dark and emotionally fraught home life with two abusive parents. Skating to Antarctica is an unusual blend of travel essay and personal memoir, one that uses the phases of a physical journey to trace the trajectory of the inner life. Both journeys begin for Diski when her 18-year-old daughter Chloe decides to search for the maternal grandmother she has never met. It has been 30 years since Diski last saw her mother, and she has no desire to find her; is it merely coincidence that she books her passage to Antarctica shortly after Chloe begins the hunt?

Weaving painful memories of a childhood spent entangled in her parents' vicious sexual psychodramas and an adolescence in and out of mental wards into an account of her slow journey south, Diski imbues both voyages of discovery with a resonance that comes largely from twinning these tales. Like all polar travelers, she has the experiences of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton before her; instinctively she rejects the "heroism" of Scott's pointless death in a blizzard, embracing, instead Shackleton's pragmatic rescue of his stranded crew. "The will to live was not strong in my family," Diski writes near the end of her book; Skating to Antarctica, however, is proof that this apple at least fell far, far from the tree.

From Publishers Weekly
Only after learning the details of the author's upbringing will readers understand why she never contacted her mother after her father's death in 1966. Novelist Diski (Nothing Natural) was brought up in a London Jewish community, the only child of a father who specialized in confidence games and a suicidal mother who alternated between depression and violent outbursts. Both parents played sexual touching games with her, she reports, in this powerful memoir. Diski describes how she and her mother were evicted for nonpayment of rent after her father left home and how she endured years of unstable school and living arrangements because her parents were too self-involved to care for her. Diski was treated for depression in psychiatric hospitals and learned to value the quiet she found there. Woven into this harrowing memoir are beautiful descriptions of a trip she took to Antarctica, whose blank landscape Diski compares to the safety and isolation of the mental hospital. Recently her own daughter, Chloe, decided to search for Diski's mother and learned that she died nine years ago, a fact that has provided the author with some closure to the pain of her childhood.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Diski intercuts surreal memories of a harrowing childhood with a lyrical account of sea travel, fellow travelers, and glaciers whose absolute whiteness she finds so comforting. Her preference is no wonder--for the white of the hospital psychiatric ward had been better for her than her youthful home life with an abusive, rejecting mother and her memories of the alcoholic father who deserted them. She sought oblivion in substance abuse and psychosis as a teenager, and as an adult, she thought her mother's best gift had been leaving her alone since 1966, when her father died. When her grown daughter started exploring the fate of her maternal grandmother, Diski's emotional distance and equilibrium were disturbed. Her lengthy journey provided the environment in which she finally delved into memories of abuse, rediscovered the little girl beneath an exterior hardened by emotional chaos, and faced the possibility that her mother might still be alive. Other journeyers will find much here to ponder. Whitney Scott