Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis

At the centre of this multi-layered adventure novel is the fate of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition of the "Payer-Weyprecht-Expedition", which departs in the Arctic summer of 1872 into the unexplored sea northeast of the Siberian archipelago of Novaya Semlya. The expedition ship will soon - and forever - be enclosed by pack ice. After more than a year of drifting through all the horrors of ice and darkness, the scurvy crew discovers a group of islands buried under glaciers on the edge of the world and christens them "Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Land" in honour of a distant ruler. One of the last blind spots has thus been erased from the map of the Old World.
Parallel to the drama of this historical expedition, Ransmayr tells the story of a young Italian living in Vienna named Mazzini, who more than a hundred years later becomes an obsessed collector of all the testimonies and documents left behind by the "Payer-Weyprecht-Expedition" and finally sets off for the Arctic Ocean to follow the discovery of the "Franz-Joseph-Land" as a passenger on a Norwegian research ship. But in the course of his research on the polar history of discovery, Mazzini gets deeper and deeper into the Arctic present and finally disappears, a sleigh traveller, in the glacier landscapes of Spitsbergen.