Eiland

A Danish author with Faroese roots takes her narrator (who shares her ancestry - it again becomes hard to separate an author from a narrator) to the island of her grandparents. The novel has two timelines that get weaved around each other - the grandparents leaving the islands for Denmark and the

granddaughter coming back home after their deaths. The two stories meet in the narrator's memories so it really becomes a 3-timelines narrative, split between the two places and shifting between them and across the years. It is a tale of emigration and longing to belong, of assimilation and getting yourself lost and then finding yourself again. The Faroe Islands are where the family is; Denmark is where the future seems to be. There is something sad about that, something almost anyone who moved away from home will recognize. The novel is a meditation on the process of migration - stating occasionally facts that rarely get spoken about (like the three generation principle: the first generation moves, the second needs to succeed so they become doctors and lawyers and so on, the third is where people really have a choice to become artists and trombonists if they want to). There is a lot of history in this book, there are a lot of heartbreaks but there is also laughter (and a theory on why the Faroese football team (soccer for the Americans...) does not to very well when they are away from home).

If anything, the novel tends to be too busy in places - too many people, too many actions. But then... isn't this what happens when you go back home when you live abroad? The style can also be jarring in weird ways - it did not completely work for me but I appreciated the details of the islands.

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