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Novelist Sarah Moss had a childhood dream of moving to Iceland, sustained by a wild summer there when she was nineteen. In 2009, she saw an advertisement for a job at the University of Iceland and applied on a whim, despite having two young children and a comfortable life in an English cathedral city. The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland's economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary, by the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull and by a collection of new friends, including a poet who saw the only bombs fall on Iceland in 1943, a woman who speaks to elves and a chef who guided Sarah's family around the intricacies of Icelandic cuisine. Sarah was drawn to the strangeness of Icelandic landscape, and explored hillsides of boiling mud, volcanic craters and fissures, and the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She walked the coast path every night after her children were in bed, watching the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds. As the weeks and months went by, the children settled in local schools and Sarah got to know her students and colleagues, she and her family learned new ways to live.… (more)
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'It's not the real, white Arctic, the scene of centuries of bearded latitude competitions, that sets me dreaming' she says 'but the grey archipelago of Atlantic stepping-stones. Scilly, Aran, Harris, Lewis, Orkney, Fair Isle, Shetland, Faroe. Iceland, Southern Greenland, the Canadian Maritimes; a sea-road linking ancient settlements, travelled for centuries.'
Well, I can tick off the first five of those as visited (Orkney I've been to twice) as well as the Canadian Maritimes, while Shetland, Faroe and Iceland remain on the must see list, so I think somewhere or other I must have had a love of northerly islands bred into me as well! She sounds like a woman after my own heart in other ways as well: of the seven cardboard cartons which she packs up for her family's new life, three contain books and one is almost all food, Rekyavik's supermarkets being lacking in choice and hugely expensive. (Although I have to admit that I could live for a year without the preserved lemons, three kinds of paprika and dried lime leaves that find their way into her carton of food essentials.)
Names for the Sea is very much a book of two halves. The first half, while Moss and her family were expecting to be living in Iceland for a period of at least several years, is a consideration of the cultural differences between Iceland and the UK (and the rest of Europe in general) experienced by Moss and her family, and in particular her reactions to them (which are more thoughtful than is frequently found in books of this type). And there are a lot of cultural differences, with food being particularly problematic. On the evidence of this book, Iceland does not seem to be a country that gives food a lot of thought at all. While in theory Moss wants to try as many as possible of Iceland's traditional dishes in practice, delicacies such as charred sheep's heads fail to win her over in practice:
'If you look into the meat section of an Icelandic supermarket, burnt sheep's heads will look back at you, milky eyeballs projecting out of brown skulls. Apparently they come cut in half, so you don't have to saw through the skull at home. Max wants us to buy one. I am pretending I don't think Tobias has eaten sheep's brains at nursery. Icelanders regard this as an easy week night supper and my students are amused by my horror. You eat lambs' legs, they say, why not the head? They are right - I can see that it's moral as well as logical to eat the whole once you've killed it - but I'm still not going to touch one, much less take it home and scoop its brains out'
By the second half of the book, Moss and her husband have come to the conclusion that financially Iceland is not viable for them as a long term home, and the tone of the book changes, becoming less of a personal response to adapting to a new culture and more of a travelogue. This certainly contains some interesting parts, but for me loses the personal nature of the first half of the book.
This is not the book to read for advice on planning your next vacation trip to Iceland; not even the book to read for advice on moving there – Names for the Sea is not out to give practical tips, but chiefly concerns itself with the experience of trying to fit in a foreign country. And as it turns out – and this is probably the most fascinating part about this highly enjoyable book – this experience is not less of a struggle when the culture one attempts to make oneself at home in appears so very similar to one’s own. The book starts off with a kind of prologue, a short description of the author’s visit to Iceland as a 19-year old, then goes on to a description of her one-year stay as lecturer at a university in Reykjavik with her husband and two small children and ends with a kind of epilogue, another visit to Iceland after the author’s return to England which in many ways calls back to her initial visit. From that circular structure it is already noticeable that this is not some random rambling, but that the author has given her narrative a form, and I think one can safely infer from this that Names for the Sea aims for more than being a simple recital of facts, or even a series of travel impressions.
Although the book certainly does offer a phenomenology of Iceland, seen from the perspective of someone who is stranger enough to still keep some distance to what she describes, but at the same time close enough to develop a sense of what it is like to actually live in that country. The major part of the book, between epilogue and prologue, falls I think into two parts (of about equal length) – the first tells of how the author attempts to make a home in Iceland, at first trying to recreate what she used to have back in England, then, as she gradaully realises the impossibility of that, as she and her family are more and more exposed to the realities of living in Iceland, coming to terms and making their peace with Iceland’s unique environment. The second half sets in when the author and her husband decide to leave Iceland after a year has passed – from then on, her narrative becomes considerably more like a “normal” travel tale, with her visiting interesting locales and interviewing interesting people, the book moves from experience to description (and I also suspect, although that is never explicitly mentioned, that this was also the point where she decided to write a book on her experiences in Iceland, and collecting material for that). But even in the latter part, the reader is always made aware that this is not an objective, detached report, but that a country, the landscape, other people are only accessible as part of a subjective experience. Consequently, we find out a lot about the narrator in the course of this book (who, as this is non-fiction, is presumably identical with the author) which in turns gives the reader some insights into how contemporary British people experience themselves and their place in the world.
But what seems to interest Sarah Moss – what, at least, I found the most fascinating part of Names for the Sea is precisely not the description of a single culture, not even a comparative study on how British and Icelandic ways of life differ. I think the book is more ambitious than that and actually aims for an exploration of how two cultures interact, what it means to be a stranger in a foreign country. She shows the struggle of having to find a place of your own in a place where you do not belong, but also the excitement of it, the discoveries along with the frustrations, and the joy when you finally become comfortable. There is tinge of melancholy at the end when the author and her family visit Iceland again, but it is a bitter-sweet sensation for it shows that after one year of staying there Iceland did manage to some degree become their home.
I read this book on a whim and it turned out to be a very pleasant surprise – not just a travel book but a thoughtful exploration of the borderline between cultures, and an excellently written one, too – there are (mostly in the book’s first part) many intense descriptions of light on the Icelandic landscape and (mostly in the second part) of encounters with various people and places (a visit to the water museum being one of my favourites). I will have to check out one of Sarah Moss’ novels soon.
Interesting anecdote about a teachers year in Iceland, and the alienation of being a foreigner, recognising the apathy that sets in so you go no further than the known routes...
Mos fell in love with the country on a holiday and decides to take the plug and move there to take a
Through her contacts at the university, she starts to meet the people and the characters of the country. She meets a lady who claims to see the hidden people, the elves and trolls from the sagas. The people knit constantly, and she tries to take it up, but ends up crocheting.
She is there at the time of the credit crunch, where there is violence on the streets for the first time ever, and when the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupts. The Icelanders take it all in their stride.
It is a beautifully written book. Moss manages to get across the intensity of the country, and some of the frustrations with the language and the way that they do things. Unlike most travel books that are transitory, she is living there are is part of the community; her respect for the country and love of the natural phenomena such as the aurora, comes across really powerfully in the book.
She had expected to experience
Sarah Moss is a wordsmith and I loved her account of her year – the day to day challenges of living and raising children in a country with winters without sunrises and extreme cold, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption, her friend’s participation in the ‘Pots and Pans’ uprising and her explorations of the culture.
There were many topics that you’d expect her to explore – such as knitting and the hidden folk (faeries).
There were also many surprises for her – including the complete lack of Icelandic grown fruits and very few vegetables, causing her to explore the traditional Icelandic cooking. Other unexpected aspects included the cars Icelanders drive, and the total lack of opportunity to buy things second hand - which was the way she had planned to furnish her family’s apartment for the year.
Highly recommended – and I’ll definitely continue reading Sarah Moss.
But, I honestly wonder: how is it possible that in the age of google people really go somewhere for a year and do not do the research. Even if I haven't been to Iceland, I was surprised Moss didn't know about some of the things about Iceland that seem to be pretty pedestrian "common knowledge". I am not sure if that is just a literary device to make this whole experience sound more novel or genuine proof of how much people do get isolated in their "ivory towers". It seemed more the latter, and many of the remarks the author makes were kind of detached and "classist".
What is unique is that Sarah Moss, similar to her fiction, has this sombre, intellectual approach to cultural adaptation and being "a stranger in a strange land". Her year abroad is not a light-hearted, humorous adventure. She digs deep into the topics that fascinate her (the amount of detail makes this a tedious read at times), but there is this constant undertone of anxiety throughout the book.
What I found disappointing was that there was very little (if any) magic of moving to a new and strange place, especially the one like Iceland. I didn't feel that spark anywhere and this whole experience seemed to be more like a year of merely surviving and just dealing with the "weirdness" of the local folk.
The last quarter or so of the book was a little bit more joyful but too late to change the overall feel. It wasn't a bad read, but I simply expected something else.
Moss includes elements of history that may be new to some readers. She arrived in Iceland just after the financial collapse of 2008, known as the kreppa. She describes the “Pots and Pans Revolution” and the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in April 2010, which disrupted air travel and became global news.
She beautifully describes watching the aurora borealis with her son: “The sea is rough after the last storm, refracting oblongs of lime and violet framed by white foam, and the upper half of the world is festooned with light, swaying in figures and swathes that remind me one minute of a crowd of ball gowns hanging to dry, the next of searchlights coming from above.” She relates the pros and cons of living in a location that experiences half year of continuous light followed by a half year of darkness.
Moss is an engaging writer and does not shy away from describing her own shortcomings, such as not being willing to speak English to locals, while not being confident enough in her ability to converse in Icelandic. Luckily, her young sons learn the language quickly and can interpret for her. She also candidly discusses her struggles to fit into the local customs, such as allowing her children outside unsupervised in a rugged terrain. She inserts a bit of self-deprecating humor along the way.
The author takes time to get to know the people of Iceland through interactions, questioning, and interviews. The result is a pleasing combination of her own experiences and perspectives from residents. For example, she visits various people that share information about the country’s myths and legends, including elves, hidden people, and Yule Lads. In fact, some may be surprised to learn “the Department of Transportation consults mediums who speak to the hidden people.”
Even though Moss and her family encountered a few obstacles, she treats her subject with respect, and it is obvious how much she enjoyed living there. She spent most of her time in Reykjavík and went back later to travel to more remote places. This book goes beyond a typical travel memoir. It provides an empathetic and insightful exploration of this unique country.