Who Is Crazy?

By Philip Herrera

BACK TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD

by HANS RUESCH

202 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

At the top of the world, far north of the Arctic Circle, snow falls only in the summer. The rest of the year is too cold for precipitation, for vegetation and, one would suppose, for human life. Yet a few hundred nomadic polar Eskimos prowl the icy region, always shadowed by the imminence of death from cold or starvation. They describe themselves simply as Inuit--The Men.

Their sorrows (and joys) are the stuff of this factually sound, stark, deft novel. A sequel to Author Ruesch's widely praised Top of the World (1950), it traces the adventures of Papik and his wife Vivi. Their lives are as simple and stylized as an ivory snow knife. She chews hides and sews them into waterproof clothes. He hunts, knowing how to convince the wary seal that he is also a seal until he spears it. Together, they try to have a son--another provider. Girls are of no use; the parents stuff their first-born daughter's mouth with snow and set her out to die.

Aside from learning how to survive, Inuit are schooled only in tradition. Their courtly language lacks pronouns--Papik refers to himself as "a man" --and the same selflessness marks their customs. "Be one!" Papik says, urging another hunter to share his wife. In fact, Inuit share everything from basic emotion to their most irresistible delicacy--a violet paste made of bird slime, seal guts, maggoty meat, rotten blubber and premasticated birds. Papik's father deliberately wounds himself to make his injured son less lonely in his pain.

To anthropological fascination Ruesch adds sardonic bite by contrasting The Men with white men. Every Eskimo knows that whites are comic. A favorite Inuit joke involves Admiral Peary's trek to the North Pole: What did he find there? Punch line: "Nothing, absolutely nothing!" Hilarious!

Papik discovers that whites are also baleful. He sees naked greed in an organized seal slaughter, intolerable boredom in a job at an automated fish-processing plant, and true lunacy in the fact that white oil explorers live by their clocks. The whites "are so crazy," he concludes that "they believe they alone make sense." In a glorious scene, he fashions a knife out of his own freezing excrement. When it is rock hard, he kills two huskies with it and builds a sled of pelts and bones. Then he triumphantly carries his family off to a free life in a place remote from whites. Readers will rejoice. .Philip Herrera

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