Vendela Vida
HarperCollins, 226 pp.
In far-north Lapland, Clarissa Iverton goes looking for her origins, searching for her father and looking, of course, for what she can learn about who and what she’s come from. Can we ever know?
From New York, Clarissa travels to Helsinki and north to the Arctic Circle, where it’s so cold a snow-mobiler gets frostbite when a new face mask doesn’t quite cover his face. The air is cold, the days are dark, and so is this story. Joan Didion is quoted as saying of Vida’s first novel, “[This book] is so fast, so mesmerizing to read, and so accomplished that it’s hard to think of it as a first novel, which it is.” I agree the story here is also accomplished, insofar as pace and structure are concerned. But I found it neither fast nor mesmerizing.
How can you be mesmerized by people you can’t possibly like? It’s not the fabled oddness of far-north Scandinavians that makes them unlikeable (to me). Or maybe it is. Can you relate to a reindeer herder? A Sami healer with secrets? Maybe so. There's also something I can only call superficial about Clarissa. Yes, she has problems. Yes, I empathize. But I don't much care for her even so.
I do love Vida’s style; she is a poetic writer and captures the darknesses in the heart as well as in the days.
The best thing about this book to me is the title. Erase your name. Think about it. I guess the northern lights could do it right.
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