“ I am the nameless crew member who died on January 27, 1597.” So reports the Dutch narrator of Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost from his icy grave on the Arctic archipelago Novaya Zemyla, separating what is known today as the Barents and Kara Seas in Russia. But when this expedition set out to find a “ northeast passage” from Europe to China, the landmasses blocking such a route were unknown. While the expedition failed, the narrator becomes a sentient part of the landscape, privy to centuries of change.

Remember Pizzagate, the insane 2016 conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta were involved with a child sex-trafficking ring being run out of the basem…