Content
- I. Introduction: The first evening and the grammar of space
- II. Siamese Twins: Self-Destruction in Success
- III. The mine as a living body: an anthropology of the underground
- IV. History as geological stratification: competing temporalities
- V. Feminist Archaeology: The Conquest of a Forbidden Space
- VI. Poetics of Impossibility: Writing as Counter-Research
- VII. Coda: What the Mine Tells
I. Introduction: The first evening and the grammar of space
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun (Lille: Éditions La Contre Allée, 2019).
Maylis de Kerangal travels through the winter darkness to Kiruna, a northern Swedish city entirely dominated by the vast iron ore mine. Upon arrival, she immediately recognizes that the mine, like a black mountain on the horizon, dictates not only the landscape but also the very fabric of the city's life. She drives through snow-covered streets, descends into the tunnels, encounters engineers, miners, urban planners, and residents, and traces the story of a city forced to relocate itself as the ever-expanding mine destabilizes the ground beneath its homes. Listening to the dull rumble of the blasts, examining old photographs, reconstructing the history of the 1969 strike, and following the traces of the Sámi people, she discovers a world of geological strata, memories, and hidden conflicts. Yet, she repeatedly encounters limitations: the deepest reaches of the mine remain inaccessible. She thus approaches her true goal by observing the surface – the people, their voices, their stories, and the signs of a landscape shaped by ore extraction. When she finally leaves Kiruna, the mine disappears from view, but the experiences and encounters remain. It is precisely from this limited perspective that the book's true movement unfolds. kirun It can be read as a reflection on the impossibility of direct knowledge. Instead of directly grasping the mine, the narrator explores its effects on the surface—in people's bodies, in the stories of the miners, in the relocation of the town, in the conflicts with the Sámi, and in the sediments of different eras. The plot, therefore, consists less of a series of spectacular events than of a persistent circling of a hidden center. The mine becomes an image of an origin that shapes the visible world without itself becoming fully visible. By traversing the surface and imagining the depths, the narrator... kirun Towards a poetics of indirect knowledge: Understanding arises not from complete transparency, but from attention to traces, fragments, and resonances. The relocation of the city thus appears as an expression of a modernity whose productivity undermines its own preconditions. In this way, de Kerangal develops a form of writing that does not dissolve the hidden, but preserves its darkness and finds in it a possibility of knowledge.
The connection between kirun and Kerangal's poetological considerations from La lentille et le roman (2026) lies in a common theory of vision. In kirun Perception begins with blurriness: Upon arriving at night, the landscape and city initially dissolve into darkness, and only the bus headlights create a legible exterior for brief moments. The mine itself ultimately remains eluding the narrator; she cannot penetrate to its core and is forced to content herself with fragments, traces, and isolated voices. But this limitation becomes productive. Like the Fresnel lens, which consists of many small, discontinuous surfaces yet focuses light, the novel also functions as an optic of the particular: It does not create a total overview but rather constructs an image from fragments, an image that always remains partial. The blurred view is therefore a condition of knowledge. The narrator reads the surface, imagines the hidden depths, and assembles a structure from details, memories, and documents that does not negate the invisible but makes it visible without eliminating its remaining darkness. In this sense, the novel realizes kirun already that poetics which de Kerangal later in La lentille et le roman To put it explicitly: The novel is a lens that does not show everything, but sharpens the view of the individual and, precisely through its limited scope, enables a different form of seeing.
Maylis de Kerangal opens kirun with a scene that marks less an arrival than a moment of realization. On the bus from the small airport of the northern Swedish mining town, the surroundings initially fail to coalesce into a coherent whole. Courtyards, fragments of facades, and individual points of light emerge without coalescing into any order. Kiruna initially appears as a collection of disparate signs—cranes, roundabouts, orange windows—lacking the central point that structures the space. When the narrator recognizes the mine, coherence emerges.
C'est seulement au moment où je reconnais la mine, où j'identifie sa forme alors qu'elle se mass dans l'axe de la route – sommet plat, profile en palier, pente douce – que l'espace s'organise, qu'il trouve soudain son unité. Elle est là, close et mate, plus black que le ciel, dressée au-delà d'une surface plane, et claire – the clarté fluorescente de la neige dans la night.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
It is only in the moment I recognize the mine, in the moment I identify its form, how it condenses along the axis of the road – flat summit, stepped profile, gentle slope – that the space orders itself and finds its unity. It is there, closed and dull, blacker than the sky, rising up beyond a flat surface and at the same time bright – the fluorescent glow of snow in the night.
In this scene, the book's poetic program is already condensed. The mine does not appear as an object among other objects, but as the principle that organizes space. The city does not determine the perception of the mine; rather, the city derives its form from the presence of the underground ore deposit. Kiruna is not a city that arose by chance above a mine. The mine forms the hidden center from which the visible world is structured.
De Kerangal's writing follows this reversal. Not human settlement, but the logic of the underground determines the grammar of the visible. This essay traces five intertwined threads: the dialectic of city and mine and the dynamics of self-destruction in success; the anthropomorphic metaphor of the mine as a living body; the concept of history as a layering of different times; the question of women and their gradual appropriation of a long-forbidden space; and finally, the poetics of the text itself, which develops its own mode of writing from the failure of direct research. These perspectives do not constitute separate thematic fields. Rather, they resemble concentric shafts leading down to the same subject matter. At their center lies the question of how to write something that eludes direct observation.
II. Siamese Twins: Self-Destruction in Success
The image of those born together
In the section “siamoise sisters”, de Kerangal formulates one of the key insights of her research. After observing the mine for a long time in the early morning hours, she writes:
À Kiruna, the ville et la mine ont surgi de terre comme deux sœurs siamoises à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, and sont aujourd'hui encore le recto et le verso d'une même réalité. This histoire de co-creation et de dépendance réciproque est au coeur de ce qui motive mon voyage, elle éclaire la tension phénoménale qui organise les lieux.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
In Kiruna, the town and the mine emerged from the earth like Siamese twins at the end of the nineteenth century and remain today the front and back of a single reality. This story of shared creation and mutual dependence lies at the heart of what motivates my journey; it illuminates the phenomenal tension that organizes these places.
The image of the Siamese sisters is more than illustrative. It describes a form of fusion in which both parts remain inextricably linked. City and mine share the same body. It is precisely from this that the dynamic arises which de Kerangal describes as Kiruna's inner tragedy.
Since its founding in 1899, the mine has undermined its own foundations. More than a billion tons of ore have been extracted from the rock; the consequences of this extraction are visible on the surface. De Kerangal describes this process in a language that combines geological vocabulary with imagery that makes the spatial consequences visible:
Affaissements, éboulis, fractures: plus the mine s'étend sous terre et plus les fissures apparaissent en surface. This phenomenal phenomenon, which is not the property of the mine of Kiruna, is a successor to the development and rapidity of preparation, finished by directing the maisons located in the long vein and by the entrainer of urgent evacuations, effectuées au coup par coup et sans plan établi of the 60th anniversary.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Subsidence, rockfalls, cracks: The further the mine extends underground, the more cracks appear on the surface. This aftershock phenomenon, which is not unique to the Kiruna mine, seems to have developed here faster than expected, ultimately directly threatening the houses along the vein and triggering emergency evacuations since the 1960s, carried out ad hoc and without a fixed plan.
The ambiguity of the French word is remarkable. replica, which can refer to both an aftershock and a response. The mine is, in a sense, responding to its own expansion. Its underground extent is reflected in the cracks on the surface. Production and destruction are thus inextricably linked.
The cycle of addiction
De Kerangal describes this connection with great analytical clarity:
Intimental lies, the destins of the mine and the city are désormais pris ins une même impasse: the mine continues de s'étendre sans que rien ne bouge, les habitants, menacés, finished par vider les lieux. Or the mine is a part of the hommes for function, and you cadre de vie que leur donne la ville pour les retenir dans this région des confins, enfouie dans la nuit polaraire ou baignée du soleil de minuit. Si la mine fermait or si le rythme d'extraction du minerai ralentissait afin de préserver ce qui peut encore l'être, alors Kiruna se viderait sans doute d'au moins la moitié de ses habitants: il n'y aurait plus assez d'emplois pour retenir ici ci ci qui vivent, directement ou non, this resource.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Closely intertwined, the fates of the mine and the town are now trapped in a shared impasse: if the mine continues to expand without any changes, the threatened residents will eventually abandon their homes. But the mine needs people to function, and the framework the town provides to keep them in this remote region, buried in the polar night or bathed in the midnight sun. If the mine were to close, or if the pace of ore extraction were to slow to preserve what little remains, Kiruna would undoubtedly lose at least half its population.
The argument describes a closed cycle. The mine needs the city because it needs workers; the city needs the mine because its economic existence depends on it. The contradiction cannot be resolved without jeopardizing one of the two sides.
The decision by LKAB and the planning authorities therefore does not consist of overcoming this tension, but rather of its spatial relocation. Kiruna is being moved. The company's communication strategies accompany this process with language that translates loss into the future:
These stratégies de communication jouent à plein, qu'elles rassurent ou que l'on fasse semblant d'y croire. Elles ont pour objet de faciliter l'abandon des maisons et d'encourager l'appropriation de la new ville, oui, mais avant tout de convertir une solution imposée en issue consensuelle, de transformer l'obligation émanant d'un seul en action collective, de substituer à l'anxiété de la perte l'excitation d'une ville à inventer, de faire du “déménagement” and “développement”.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
These communication strategies are effective regardless of whether they actually reassure or merely feign doing so. Their purpose is to ease the task of relinquishing one's homes and to promote the appropriation of the new city; indeed, but above all to transform an imposed solution into a consensual outcome, to convert individual obligation into collective action, to replace the fear of loss with the excitement of creating a new city, and to transform the 'move' into a 'development'.
De Kerangal focuses her attention on these linguistic shifts. The move becomes development, a necessity a project. By making these transformations visible, her text develops its own counter-language, which exposes the discrepancy between rhetoric and experience.
At the end of the political horizon appear the voices of the Sámi, whose perspective sets a different emphasis:
À rebours de la première mondiale fascinante vantée dans les médias, ils voient le déménagement de Kiruna comme une conséquence sinistre de la proliferation minière et de la pression ultralibérale que connaît la région. La preuve topographique que l'on est ici dans l'one des ruines du capitalisme.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Contrary to the fascinating world first touted in the media, they see Kiruna's relocation as a grim consequence of mining proliferation and ultraliberal pressure in the region. Topographical proof that this is one of the ruins of capitalism.
This gives the image of the Siamese sisters another dimension. What remains of their union is not a harmonious unity, but a landscape inscribed with the traces of their shared history.
III. The mine as a living body: an anthropology of the underground
Beneath the Earth's Skin
Early on, de Kerangal articulated the true goal of her journey. She was not seeking mere information or technical documentation, but an experience that would be inscribed on the body:
You can descend from the mine, passing the face of the planet comme on the face of the surface of the sea, entering the entrance to another reality also determined and invisible that is the interior of the human body. You want to live this experience, you want to write: I'm part of Kiruna.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
I wanted to descend into the mine, to put my head beneath the planet's surface, like one puts one's head beneath the ocean's surface, to immerse oneself in another reality, one that is just as defining and invisible as the interior of the human body. I wanted to live this experience, I wanted to write about it: I went to Kiruna.
The metaphor of plunging beneath the ocean's surface illustrates a transition that is neither complete nor final. Part of the body remains in the known world, while the other already penetrates a hidden sphere. The invisible realm does not appear as an exotic counter-world, but rather as the very realm that makes the visible world possible in the first place. In this analogy, the interior of the human body and the Earth's subsurface correspond. Both elude our view, yet both define the surface.
This relationship structures the entire text. De Kerangal describes the earth with terms usually reserved for the body: skin, veins, depth, rhythm. At the same time, the people appear in images reminiscent of geological processes—layering, sedimentation, and deposition. A continuous movement of analogies arises between body and rock.
The pulse of the mine
This anthropomorphization is particularly evident in section “–1365”, which refers to the current production depth. It states:
The mine is active 24 hours a day, 7 days a day and 365 days a day. Elle ne connaît aucun jour de pause, ni les machines qui refroidissent, ni les motors qui se rechargent: ici, ça ne s'arrête jamais. C'est un corps vivant.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
The mine is active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It knows no rest, neither the machines cooling down nor the motors recharging: here, it never stops. It is a living organism.
The concluding sentence reads like a diagnosis. The mine possesses its own rhythm, which is never interrupted. Its metabolism knows no standstill. In this sense, it appears as an organism with its own temporality.
The work of the people is directly linked to this. The miners work in eight-hour shifts. This rhythm, writes de Kerangal, reveals the unique nature of underground work, its risks, and its effects on the human body. The body of the mine and the bodies of the workers are synchronized to the same rhythm.
The descent into the depths
This entanglement intensifies during the journey into the shaft. Together with Lars, the narrator descends the tunnel's spirals in the car. Her attention is focused not only on her surroundings but also on her own body.
I am representative of the scene in a coupe, the profile car in the boyau, Lars and my interior, and the hauteur de roche, which is a part of the beauty of our faces, which has a mesure that nous basculons in the matière. […] J'ai l'impression que mon cœur accélère, que le sang s'active plus fort dans mes veines, je me demande si la pression va se faire sentir ici comme lorsque je plonge en apnée l'été au bas des falaises de Sainte-Marguerite.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
I try to visualize the scene in cross-section, the car in profile in the shaft, Lars and I inside, and the rock face rising incessantly above our heads, growing as we lean into the material. […] I feel my heart beating faster, my blood pumping harder in my veins; I wonder if the pressure here will be as noticeable as when I'm freediving at the foot of the cliffs of Sainte-Marguerite in the summer.
Diving once again appears as a model for descent. The narrator reads space through her body. Heartbeat, blood circulation, and pressure sensation become instruments of perception. The invisible is revealed not through distance and abstraction, but through resonance.
In this way, a dual phenomenology emerges. While the narrator describes the damp walls, the puddles, and the monochrome gray of the tunnel, she simultaneously registers her own body's reactions. Knowledge thus becomes a process that combines observation and self-observation.
The acoustic presence of the underground
Besides the visible and tangible aspects, the mine possesses an acoustic dimension. In the section "acoustique," de Kerangal notes:
Je perçois parfois la vibration de la mine, sourde, qui semble s'intensifier la nuit quand la ville there, or bien ce groundement sec quand on dynamite la roche à plus d'un kilometer dans le fond de la terre. J'écoute.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Sometimes I feel the dull vibration of the mine, which seems to intensify at night when the city sleeps, or that dry rumble when they blast the rock more than a kilometer deep inside the earth. I listen.
The brief sentence at the end possesses a peculiar restraint. It refrains from explanation and interpretation. Perception takes the place of analysis.
The vibrations of the mine beneath the slumbering city point to the differing rhythms of the two entities. While the city sleeps, the mine continues its work. Beneath the stillness of the surface, a movement persists that never truly ceases. The dull tremors thus become the acoustic signature of that hidden activity which both sustains and threatens the city's life.
IV. History as geological stratification: competing temporalities
Coordinates and depths
The composition of kirun It follows a spatial logic. Geographical coordinates are followed by depth readings such as -514 or -1365. This structure translates the principles of geology into the form of the text. History appears as stratification. The deeper the view extends, the older the sediments that emerge.
De Kerangal formulated this idea during her visit to the Lewarde Mining Museum:
Espaces, empreintes, indices, voix, remémoration: ce jour-là, j'accède à la mine comme on accède à un lieu total, livré grandeur nature, an endroit dont la singularité tient, entre other, aux différentes temporalités qui s'y entrechoquent, interfèrent, se réactivent, formant ce circuit troublant où l'on se déplace par un jeu de glissement continuedl. You comment on the existence of a mine in a place that provokes an acceleration of history. Suscité des migrations et sédimenté une culture, stimulate les sciences et la technique, aménagé un territoire, mobilisé le droit, l'économie, l'urbanisme, créé une sociabilité, engendré un langage. Dès lors, la mine s'érige en lieu politique.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Spaces, imprints, traces, voices, memory: On that day, I reach the mine as one reaches a complete place, handed over in its original size, a place whose uniqueness lies, among other things, in the different temporalities that collide, overlap, and reactivate each other there, forming this unsettling cycle in which one moves through a continuous game of slippage. Or: How the existence of a mine in a particular place has triggered an acceleration of history. It has brought about migrations and sedimented a culture, stimulated science and technology, shaped a territory, mobilized law, the economy, and urban planning, created a sociability, and brought forth a language. From then on, the mine rises to become a political site.
A long series of effects followed: migrations, technological developments, legal regulations, new forms of coexistence, and the emergence of a distinct language. History is deposited like rock. Culture appears as sediment.
The time of the Sámi
De Kerangal contrasts the history of mining with an older historical layer:
This information, issues from the geographical cartography of the sun, cannot be retrieved from another donnée, essential, in the situation of Kiruna in a time when the South was prepared and when the mine was prepared, in a time when the Laponie device [...] and the Sámis, the people of the autochtone of Europe, Men and women of tradition nomade dont a minority pratique encore l'élevage des rennes: Kiruna est depuis 1973 le siege de leur parlement.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
This information, derived from the geological mapping of a soil, could not obscure another essential fact that places Kiruna in a time that predates Sweden and the mine, a time that makes Lapland visible […] and the Sámi, the last indigenous people of Europe, men and women in a nomadic tradition, a minority of whom still practice reindeer herding: Kiruna has been the seat of their parliament since 1973.
The mine's history begins with the founding of LKAB. The history of the Sámi people stretches back further. Their presence forms a deeper layer, not erased by industrial expansion, but obscured. The migration routes of reindeer herds and the logic of mining increasingly come into conflict.
The different time periods exist side by side. None completely replaces the other. It is precisely this superimposition that makes the place legible.
The 1969 strike
The history of the mine also includes the history of its conflicts. De Kerangal recalls the strike of 1969:
A coup d'arrêt tout de même, la grève de décembre 1969, quand, au matin du 9, trente-cinq mineurs de Svappavaara posent leurs tools et débrayent, bientôt rejoints par ceux des other sites. The malaise is profound. LKAB a double sa production durant les dix dernières années, engrangeant des bénéfices importants tandis que la paie des mineurs, elle, n'a pas augmenté en proportion. Les hommes ne veulent plus être payés à la pièce, ils exigent un salaire mensuel ; surtout, ils dénoncent un “esclavagisme ultramoderne” et revendiquent la suppression du control des temps de work par des systèmes censés chronométrer chaque tâche.
Nevertheless, it was a turning point: the strike of December 1969, when on the morning of the 9th, thirty-five miners from Svappavaara laid down their tools and went on strike, soon followed by those from the other sites. Their discontent ran deep. LKAB had doubled its production in the previous ten years, making considerable profits, while the miners' wages had not increased proportionally. The men no longer wanted to be paid by piecework; they demanded a monthly salary. Above all, they denounced what they called "ultramodern slavery" and demanded the abolition of timekeeping systems designed to stop all work.
The term "ultramodern slavery" encapsulates the experience of a modernization linked to new forms of control. Electrification and rationalization appear not as counter-images to exploitation, but as its contemporary manifestation.
When Lars remarks that his grandfather once played an important role in the union, but then adds that all that is over now, it becomes clear how institutional narratives relegate conflicts to the past. History becomes sedimented. De Kerangal attempts to uncover these layers once again.
The Museum and the Linearity of Progress
De Kerangal pays particular attention to the forms in which history is exhibited and narrated. The underground museum on level -514 appears as a site of staging. The history presented there follows a linear narrative of progress:
D'emblée, j'éprouve devant ce récit, devant ces documents, ces machines, ces dioramas et ces objects, an impression de linéarité, d'évolution constante, inéluctable, comme si rien ne s'était jamais vraiment opposé à ce dessein industriel, à ce movement en avant que l'on Appelle aussi “la marche du Progrès”, et qui occulte la dose de croyance, de convoitise, de courage et de violence qu'il fallut pour imaginer la mine et la rendre réelle – la dose de Folie aussi.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Immediately, in the face of this narrative, these documents, these machines, these dioramas and these objects, I feel an impression of linearity, of a constant, inescapable development, as if nothing had ever truly opposed this industrial project, this forward movement, which is also called 'the march of progress' – and which conceals the degree of faith, greed, courage and violence that was necessary to conceive and realize the mine – the degree of madness as well.
The diorama creates a seamless narrative. Conflicts, contradictions, and coincidences disappear behind a logic of continuous development. The story is smoothed out and transformed into a closed narrative.
De Kerangal contrasts this with the experience of Lewarde. There, it is the voice of a former miner that brings the place back to life. The past does not appear as a museum object, but as something that becomes present again through memory and physicality. History here reveals itself not as a linear sequence, but as a web of interwoven eras.
V. Feminist Archaeology: The Conquest of a Forbidden Space
The long movement into the depths
The female characters in the book do not constitute a separate episode. Rather, their story runs through the entire text. From the cooks of the early years, through the legendary Svarta Bjørn and the driller Ing-Marie, to the geologist Alice, a continuity emerges that connects different generations.
In the section about Ing-Marie, de Kerangal explicitly states this development:
The truth, in Kiruna with other women, is in the relationship between women and mine, in a long descent, in the history of the conquête lens, progressive in space between the two. L'accès au monde basement leur fut longtemps défendu, les employers « au fond » étant tout simplement illégal. The article of the Worker Protection Act of 1949 states: "Women must not be used for work underground in mines or quarries".
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Indeed, in Kiruna as elsewhere, the relationship between women and the mine can be interpreted as a long decline, a story of the slow, gradual conquest of a forbidden space. Access to the underground world was long denied to them; employing them "down the shaft" was simply illegal. One of the articles of the Worker Protection Act of 1949 states this unequivocally: "Women shall not be employed for work in underground mining or quarrying."
Access to the underground world was legally prohibited for decades. The ban did not only affect the work itself. It defined the underground as a male space, thereby stabilizing a symbolic order that excluded women from a central sphere of the industrial world.
Svarta Bjørn
Among the most striking figures in the text is Anna Rebecka Hofstad, known as Svarta Bjørn. Situated between history and legend, she appears as a figure full of ambivalence:
Svarta Bjørn. This is the ensemble of virile and feminine, protection and violence, the sordid cambric, the black four-wheeler and the black foyer, the sauvagerie and the tendresse, which means that the chefs are serendipitous and receive par la suite on the same chantier.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Svarta Bjørn. I love this name, which intertwines the masculine and the feminine, protection and violence, the sordid barn, the warm fur and the black hearth, wildness and tenderness – this nickname that several female cooks in the same workplace will subsequently receive.
The name brings together opposites without resolving them. It is precisely this tension that defines the character. In the stories about Anna, strength and vulnerability, independence and exploitation appear side by side.
De Kerangal reconstructs these contradictions without harmonizing them:
Son père aurait péri dans un naufrage, sa mère serait morte quand elle était enfant […] The popular tradition insiste sur sa force: elle serait vigoureuse comme un homme quand fine pourtant, la taille prise dans le tablier, si vigoureuse que nombreux sont ceux qui sifflent à la voir charger sur son dos un gros sac de farine qu'elle remonte the long de la voie ferrée. […] Un récit prend forme, dont le verso est trace à rebours de ce personnage de libre régnant sur une cantine et tenant les hommes à bout de gaffe ou les choisissant selon son plaisir: Anna aurait été alcoolique, exploitée par les terracers, abusée.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Her father is said to have died in a shipwreck, her mother when she was a child […] Popular tradition insists on her strength: she is said to be as strong as a man, yet delicate, her waist cinched in her apron, so strong that many whistle when she carries a large sack of flour on her back along the railway line. […] A narrative takes shape, the flip side of which is drawn in reverse to that of this free woman who rules over a canteen and keeps men at a distance or chooses them at will: Anna is said to have been an alcoholic, exploited and abused by the workers.
It is precisely this coexistence of contradictory narratives that reveals how female figures are portrayed. They appear simultaneously as heroines and as victims. De Kerangal does not choose one version over the other. Rather, she exposes the mechanisms that produce both.
Ing-Marie and the possibility of proximity
After her encounter with Ing-Marie, de Kerangal notes:
Je la regarde longuement. Je la regarde en ce jour comme une amie possible.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
I look at her for a long time. On this day, she seems like a possible girlfriend.
This concise formulation contains a key element of her historical imagination. Past figures do not remain objects of contemplation. They are perceived as subjects with whom a form of closeness is possible. Historical understanding thus acquires a personal dimension without descending into identification.
Alice
The provisional endpoint of this development is Alice, the geologist. She combines technical expertise with decision-making responsibility. At the end of her self-description, she says:
Voilà: this is my pilot of the production.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
I am the one who manages production.
The sentence possesses a particular conciseness. A long historical movement stretches between the cooks of the early camps, the first female workers, and the geologist who now manages the production process.
De Kerangal portrays Alice with great attention to her everyday gestures and pragmatic decisions. It is precisely this matter-of-factness that lends the character her significance. Alice does not represent an exceptional figure outside of history. Rather, she stands at the end of a long process in which women gradually appropriated a space that had been closed to them for decades.
VI. Poetics of Impossibility: Writing as Counter-Research
The refused center
The real paradox of kirun The problem lies in the fact that the narrator never fully reaches her subject. Access to the mine's work areas remains blocked to her.
J'aimerais descendre encore, sortir de la zone d'accueil, quitter le musée et gagner les zones de work, mais Lars secoue la tête, implacable: l'accès m'est interdit, sécurité oblige, confidentialité. La mine se dérobe, elle se retire. Pour l'atteindre, je vais devoir me tourner vers la ville, vers ceux qui vivent ici. Arpenter la surface, imaginer le fond.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
I would like to descend further, leave the reception area, leave the museum behind, and reach the work areas, but Lars shakes his head, relentlessly: access is forbidden, for security reasons, for reasons of confidentiality. The mine eludes me, it retreats. To reach it, I will have to turn to the city, to those who live here. Traverse the surface, imagine the depths.
The phrase "La mine se dérobe" signifies more than just an organizational limitation. The mine appears as something that eludes immediate access. It is precisely from this experience that the text's poetic method develops.
Since the center remains inaccessible, attention is drawn to its traces. The surface becomes the site of discovery. People, conversations, memories, and landscapes appear as clues to something invisible, something that never fully reveals itself.
Against the language of institutions
This poetics-based approach includes an attention to the language used by companies and planning authorities to accompany Kiruna's relocation. De Kerangal analyzes the images and concepts used to design the city's future. She sees the visualizations of Kiruna 2, in particular, as forms of controlled perception.
quelque chose résiste: si les limits de Kiruna 2 s'effacent en sfumato sur les images, le terrain, lui, se donne pour un enclos, un espace où quelque chose est écrit d'avance, un terrain qui, par ailleurs, d'ici une centaine d'années, mais peut-être plus tôt, sera à son tour menacé par la mine.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Something resists. While the boundaries of Kiruna 2 dissolve in the sfumato images, the site itself presents itself as an enclosure, a space where something is predetermined, a site that will also be threatened by the mine in about a hundred years, perhaps sooner.
The term colour fadingDe Kerangal, whose background is in painting, describes here an aesthetic strategy of blurring. The visualizations dissolve contours and blur boundaries. He contrasts this with the materiality of the terrain. The reality of the ground contradicts the openness of the images.
In this way, the text develops a language that is not directly opposed to institutional narratives, but rather makes their mechanisms visible. This counter-language arises from precision. It consists of paying attention to those elements that defy the smooth logic of advertising and planning.
The light from the headlights
Right at the beginning of the book, there is an image that outlines the text's fundamental epistemological structure. During the journey from the airport, the narrator describes the darkness outside the bus:
Plus soon, there was a problem on the portion of the route that separates the airport from the city: the car space is black, relief and vegetation indistincts, unconceivable. The components of the vehicle construct the exterior, the font surrounds the route in a courteous distance, the créent, blanche, deux traces parallèles and a crête centrale.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Later, I experience this same unease on the stretch of road that separates the airport from the city: The space around the bus dissolves into blackness, relief and vegetation indistinguishable, the depth of field unimaginable. Only the vehicle's headlights construct the exterior, they make the road appear at a short distance, they create it, white, two parallel lanes and a central bulge.
This passage is programmatic in nature. Knowledge does not arise from a total overview, but from limited cones of light. Perception remains fragmentary. The darkness does not disappear, but forms the necessary background of all visibility.
De Kerangal's writing follows the same logic. She illuminates individual fragments—a gesture, a voice, a face, an object—and leaves the areas outside this circle of light unexplored. Thus, not knowing does not become a deficiency, but rather an integral part of the process.
Writing and Subterraneanism
In the end, the text returns to its starting point. Even after the journey, the mine remains partially hidden. The deepest working areas, the miners, and the actual extraction process continue to elude view. Yet the peripheries of this unseen world have become visible: the history, the bodies, the conflicts, the language, and the different eras that overlap in this place.
Shortly before departure, de Kerangal describes a seemingly casual gesture:
D'un geste machinal, je fais tourner autour de mon doigt l'anneau en os de renne acheté la veille au marché [...] À l'approche de l'aéroport, je cherche des yeux le Renard Blanc, à longue queue plate, qui marchait souverain le long des palissades, le premier soir.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
Mechanically, I twist the reindeer bone ring around my finger, the one I bought at the market the day before. […] As we approach the airport, I look out for the white fox with the long, flat tail that had been running along the fences the first evening.
The fox appears as a motif of recurrence. It forms a link between the beginning and end of the book. Whether the narrator actually finds it again remains open. What is crucial is the act of searching itself. The text does not end with a definitive realization, but with the persistence of the gaze.
The ring made of reindeer bone also evokes the world of the Sámi. Its circular movement condenses the structure of the narrative. The writing revolves around a center point it never fully reaches. It approaches it, circles it, and maintains the distance that accompanies all understanding.
VII. Coda: What the Mine Tells
Maylis de Kerangals kirun The narrator approaches her subject indirectly. She doesn't reach the deepest levels of the mine and observes the work underground only from a distance. It is precisely from this limitation, however, that the text's unique form develops. Direct observation is replaced by the people, the memories, the traces, and the stories that have accumulated around the invisible.
The mine thus appears not merely as a technical object or economic resource. It reveals itself as a historical and cultural construct. It has given rise to a city, altered landscapes, triggered migrations, generated conflicts, and fostered new forms of coexistence. It has shaped bodies, influenced languages, and intertwined different temporalities.
The book's structure follows this movement. The short sections resemble individual rock samples laid side by side. Layer by layer, an image emerges that is never fully complete. The text's form thus adopts the logic of its subject matter. Like a shaft, it leads deeper into the material without ever reaching a final bottom.
The last lines of the book read:
When I return, my mine is different and the chauffe is against my skin.
Maylis de Kerangal, kirun
When I turn around, the mine has disappeared, and the ring warms up against my skin.
The mine disappears from view. What remains is the warmth of an object that evokes an older story. The trace of the Sámi world, the memory of the market, and the touch of the bone remain present. In this unassuming gesture, the movement of Kerangal's text is condensed. Writing here means preserving a form of closeness to what is vanishing and restoring a sensual presence to things that elude sight.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
