As Bernard Saladin d’Anglure observes in his foreword to Sanaaq, “this is an atypical novel.” Written in Inuktitut over a period of many years beginning in the 1950s, and first published in syllabic script in 1987, it is billed as the first Inuit novel but is, more accurately, a series of related vignettes. Some of the characteristics of a traditional novel are absent, including character development and plot, although there is a great deal of incident and description and the cast is quite large. Sanaaq has its roots in an anthropologist’s request to learn the language of the Inuit; Nappaaluk obliged and then some, eventually recording 48 mostly short chapters, employing an extensive vocabulary in the context of engaging stories.

If the book cannot be read for the usual pleasures of a conventional novel, it is still fascinating and has much to teach us on an anthropological and human level. The difficulties of existence in Quebec's far North are skilfully evoked, as is the period when the Canadian government and the Catholic and Anglican churches were beginning to have an impact on Inuit life. (At the outset, getting by is unrelentingly rough for everyone, but, by the end, most of the characters are receiving government assistance cheques and being airlifted to hospital for various treatments.) What is most extraordinary, perhaps, is the good humour and devotion of the title character, her family, and friends, even as death intervenes in daily life, food proves scarce, and the weather is, at times, positively abominable.

Peter Frost has fashioned this English version not from the original Inuktitut but from d’Anglure’s 2002 French translation. This is not as strange as it sounds. It was a common practice in the 18th century, when most Germans read Sterne and Fielding in translations from French intermediaries. The translation here seems adept, although the overuse of exclamation marks in direct speech is annoying, and the constant pain to which an English reader is put to check the glossary for untranslated Inuktitut words becomes tiresome. A few word choices also seem maladroit, such as the use of “bum” when a character wants to insult a person or a dog. All the same, we are fortunate to have this important cultural and literary document now available in English.