Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

"People assume those in mourning aren’t thinking clearly,” explains Clarissa, the heroine of Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. “Ha! My brain was a razor. A flesh-eating predator.” With prose stripped so bare, this spare and understated narrative follows Clarissa on a journey to Lapland after she learns the man she called her father wasn't her father at all. Her other relationships are similarly hollow: her brother has Down's Syndrome and doesn't communicate; her fiance says he loves her and she pretends to be asleep; Clarissa's mother disappeared when she was fourteen, leaving her in a bakery because, as the woman at the counter reported, "she got tired of waiting." Clarissa is incredibly alone, but all the while this thought runs through her head like a mantra: There must be someone else... There must be someone I'm closer to.

Seeking this "someone" Clarissa escapes to the north of Finland, directed by clues to her real father's identity. What follows is a quest of sorts, but one much diverted, exhausted. It's fascinating, however, to learn more about this part of the world so unknown to me and Vida paints a sense of place so well-- a place which lends itself to this "razor-sharp prose" in its own barreness. Reading this story was a curious experience however-- I was not ultimately sure that I liked it. The prose, the choice and spare details, the traumatized voice all seemed much like what would be found in a short story, and to have it sustained for the length of a novel didn't feel quite right. A certain superficiality seemed the result, but then, oh, I read the end. The end of this novel is magic spun out of gold-- surprising, risky, realized and incredibly satisfying. Casting the entire novel in a different light than I'd been viewing it in all along, and the fact was I loved it. Which I couldn't have told you twenty pages from the end, but from the final sentence, clearly it was so.

~And when I would hear people say that you can't start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must.~

*Check out Tim's review of this book at Baby Got Books.

You must

Because I read so much, so fast, I am quite well-versed at moving on. Books end, books shut. But one book has been positively haunting me since I read it more than a month ago. You might remember that I wasn't so impressed as I read Vendela Vida's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I didn't know where the tale was leading, and the narrative seemed lacking in complexity. The prose was good, but it was all so weird. Intriguingly so, though, and I read to the end. That end. It shocked me, as it was meant to. Not with horror, but with power. Vida took everything I'd ever supposed about fate, family, obligation, story, history, and she turned it on its head. The phrase still resonates: "And when I hear people say that you can't start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must." Nothing else has ever been so wise, and the power of that moves me to tears if I think too hard. Of course you must, and I cannot wait to reread the book, galvinized by its now-inevitable close.

Summer books

Will quite shortly be now-rereading The Summer Book by Tove Janssen, which I bought in 2003 when I lived in England, solely because the edition Sort Of Books brought out then was absolutely gorgeous. The bright blue of the photograph on the cover, the photos on the endpages, even the typeface was perfect. I do remember reading this novel in the manky bathtub of my ramshackle terrace house on Silverdale Road, but I regret that I've forgotten everything within it. Surely there is more to this book than its cover, and I am excited to rediscover just that. I also think it will make a fine companion to my recently-completed To the Lighthouse. And once that's done, just to flip the solstice 180 degrees, I am going to read Vendela Vida's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

I think it's best to plan ahead.

New books

New books! On the weekend I got Stunt by Claudia Dey, and The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (ed. Vendela Vida). Now reading In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill. Have just come down with an obsessive need to acquire a copy of The Summer of My Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews.

Pickle Me This Picks of '07

These are my picks, my favourites, which is why I don't feel bad that so few were authored by men (though does it count that another author has a man's name?). I don't claim that they're the Best books of 2007 (though they might be) but just my best. I did try to read more books by men this year, by resolution, as I'd so been neglecting that poor gender. And I'm better for it, but still the books women write seem to be the ones I like the very best, however diverse they might be amongst themselves. What follows are such books, listed in the order in which I encountered them.

New Fiction

• Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert (From my review: "a startlingly original novel... What do you do with the past once it's over?")
• The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (From my review: "her achievement is creating a novel so truly beautiful out of some of the ugliest stuff the world has on offer.")
• Certainty by Madeleine Thien (From my review: "...ultimately it is the sum of these stories which provides the "certainty" amidst uncertainty: meaning is evident, and beauty abounds.")
• The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer (From my review: "Here is a summer book through and through, all the while substantial, well-written.")
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (From my post-review: "has been positively haunting me since I read it.")
• Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood (From my review: " Rosie Little is "the next Bridget Jones" for which we've been longing for ten years.")
• Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (From my review: "This book feels too whole to have been created... [A]n entity unto itself, its own world, and a truly magnificent literary achievement.")
• Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani (From my review: "The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.")
• The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (From my review: "The Thames freezing is a perfect example of an extraordinary moment in time... and Humphreys links these moments together in this small beautiful book.")
• The Great Man by Kate Christensen (From my review: "There is joy here, and there's goodness, and the whole wide world, which is certainly something for a book.")

New Non-Fiction

• Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
• Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford by Jessica Mitford
• The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
• Cake or Death by Heather Mallick
• 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa by Stephanie Nolen
• A Memoir of Friendship: Shields and Howard by Blanche and Allison Howard (eds.)
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
• Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
• Ambivalence by Jonathan Garfinkel

Not New but Glad I Discovered

• Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
• Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff