When the Whales Leave

“We have so little intimate information about these Arctic people, and the writer’s deep emotional attachment to this landscape of ice (today melting away under global warming forces) makes every sentence seem a poetic revelation.”

“Rytkheu immerses his readers in the fantastical landscapes of the Arctic circle, and does so without breaking a sweat… . His elegant, unforced descriptive writing can whip us across leagues of tundra and thread the jagged icebergs studding hyperborean seas, but when the blizzards hit and the characters are trapped in their huts, we’re snowbound there with them under the whale-oil lamp, chewing walrus and hoping for respite.”

“Yuri Rytkheu comes from a Uelen Settlement of the Chukotsk National Territory in Siberia and carries with his work the voice of that vast and majestic landscape … It’s sometimes hard to tell a fable from a fact these days, but in this case the fable states truths we shouldn’t ignore, like where we descend from and the legacies we leave behind.”

“When the Whales Leave has an epic sensibility, but is also saturated in Arctic detail; the rendering of ice, snow, wind, and water are particularly poetic. English readers are in Chavasse’s debt for bringing Rytkheu’s world into ours: a slender novel with a wide message, imploring we cease imagining ourselves masters before all our seas become ‘bereft of any sign of life.’”

“When the Whales Leave deserves a place on the shelves of every library in the North–as well as serious consideration for young adult reading lists in educational settings across the North … In bringing his rich heritage of oral traditions and ecological knowledge to western written literature, Rytkheu has produced a work of enduring wisdom for this, and future generations of the North, to maintain ties with the wisdom of their ancestors.”

“The first time I read Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse’s translation, from the Russian, of Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu’s When the Whales Leave, it was like falling into a trance. Its language induces a type of hypnosis that compels the reader to read straight through to the end.”

“This creation story, an original, imaginative work by the author, draws upon Chukchi traditional stories Rytkheu heard as a boy … [T]he language describing place and human emotion flows easily into a mystical, almost magical awareness of life’s gifts and our connections to the world beyond our own small selves … How fortunate we are to have this newly shared example of indigenous writing to add to our North American examples.”

“When the Whales Leave is predominantly a legend about how we see the world; it aims to lift a veil and show that spirituality is ever-present, although, admittedly, increasingly difficult to notice … Rytkheu invites readers to return to a place of open-mindedness and open-heartedness and see that love, hope and humanity is all around us—exactly where we left it, generations upon generations ago.”

“[When the Whales Leave] is an intimate family saga, a fantastical tale of transformations amidst a shifting landscape, and a haunting tale about the divide (or lack thereof) between humanity and the natural world. Everything clicks into place neatly, and the result is a captivating blend of the mythic and the quotidian.”

“Thousands of books have been written about the Arctic aborigines by intruders from the south. Rytkheu has turned the skin inside out and written about the way the Arctic people view outsiders. A Chukchi himself, [he] writes with passion, strength, and beauty of a world we others have never understood.”

“When the Whales Leave is a mythological manifesto.”