Summary

In Chapter 1, “Knut Speaks” (3), a man named Knut living in Copenhagen sat at home watching television. He stumbled onto a talk show about people who came from places that no longer exist, such as East Germany and the Soviet Union. Knut thought Denmark's loss of Greenland as a colony was the cause of his mother's fascination with “Eskimos,” whom she treated “as if they were her own children” (6). Suddenly, he saw a woman on the show whose ethnicity was ambiguous to him, and who came from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia” (6) that had disappeared. The woman, named Hiruko, spoke a strange language she had invented that borrowed from multiple Scandinavian languages. This interested Knut, who was a graduate student of linguistics, and he called the TV station hoping to meet Hiruko. An employee answered and told him that Hiruko would meet...