Land of the Snow Men

Fiction. LAND OF THE SNOW MEN is a collection of visionary stories and renderings taken from the journals of the enigmatic George Belden, who claimed to be on the tragic expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole in 1910 through 1912. Norman Lock discovered Belden and his remarkable journal by accident. He had been for some years in Africa, writing a novel, A History of the Imagination. The strain of living in a country as alien as Africa, with little money and little hope of finding a publisher, caused him to have a nervous breakdown. A friend in Mombassa contacted his wife, who arranged for his return and commitment to a private sanitarium in Vermont's Green Mountains. During the final weeks of Lock's recuperation, the institution's chief of staff asked if he would sort through boxes of old files in the sanitarium's basement to determine whether or not any should be kept. In one of those boxes, Lock found LAND OF THE SNOW MEN.

"Any seeming absence may be filled with projections of the mind, formlessness with language formations. (As John Cage famously demonstrated, there is always noise.) Scott's hubristic fantasy of a 'realm devoid of symbols' cannot prevent their continuance or proliferation. Eventually the trauma—the cold, the hunger, the failure of the quest, the malleability of language, the endless, disorienting whiteness—infects him, as well with epistemological uncertainty."

Miranda M. Mellis, American Book Review

Land of the Snow Men is a collection of visionary stories and renderings taken from the journals of the enigmatic George Belden, who claimed to be on the tragic expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole in 1910-12.