Book Report: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

37. Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007) (7/9/21)

Twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa lost her father two weeks ago, fourteen years after her mother simply vanished one day. Now she learns that the man she called her father was, in fact, not—and she heads to Lapland, the homeland of the reindeer-herding Sami people (akin to Native Americans), in the middle of winter, to find out the truth. And indeed, she learns more than she bargained for, ultimately emerging from her quest with new resolve about how she wants to spend her life. 

I found this book distancing, difficult to penetrate emotionally. Sometimes supercool, sometimes overwrought. Clarissa herself isn't an especially pleasant young woman: she seems remarkably immature for someone her age. I was surprised by the glowing blurbs by the likes of Michael Cunningham ("a taut, intricately layered page-turner that looks deeply and fearlessly into matters of profound human concern") and George Saunders ("What a brilliantly constructed lightning-flash of a novel: compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written"). It is well written, yes, and there are some lovely descriptions, for example of an ice hotel far above the Arctic Circle. The landscape reflects Clarissa's own sense of isolation and loss. I enjoyed the spare language.

Perhaps what I didn't like was the secrets and lies that undergird the overarching theme of abandonment. There was too little reaching out and communicating. (Much of the conversation is done in sign language.) That said, the feeling I'm left with upon completion is a haunting one. Clarissa learns enough about her mother's past to be able to put it behind her and invent a new identity in the world. A simpler one. In the whirlwind last few pages, she does figure out how to move on.

Here is a short section (most of the sections are quite short) from midway through the book, when she is in the town she believes her biological father lives in. Pankaj is her fiancé back in New York, who doesn't know where she is; Henrik is the nephew of the woman who has taken Clarissa in. This might be considered one of the overwrought passages.

Henrik had said I could use the phone to call my family. I considered calling Pankaj. There must be someone else. I should want to call Pankaj, I told myself, but I couldn't make myself dial his number. Our number. There must be someone I'm closer to.
     A telephone book for Finnmark, its cover ripped off, sat by the phone. I began flipping through it, at first, absentmindedly; then I looked for names. I searched for any Blixes that might live in Finnmark, and found none.
     I skimmed through the listings in Masi and the nearby town of Kautokeino, where my mother had stayed. Any of the names could be my father's. I imagined my body might spasm in recognition and revolt when I saw his name. It was in my blood, I would know. But as I searched blindly, I grew more frantic. I had nothing to go on. He could be anyone. Everyone.

The reason I picked this book up is that I noticed that it had a bookmark—or not a bookmark, but a postcard was tucked in its pages. It shows a rough wooden cabin with hand-hewn wood furniture and red-checkered curtains: "The interior of the dwelling-chamber of North-Estonian fisherman's dwelling from the end of the 19th century." On the back my friend Rasa wrote, "Maybe your cabin is like this? Or the cabin in Lapland, or Norway or Finland?" I don't know to what cabin she refers—possibly the one in Minnesota I stayed in for a couple of weeks during an artist residency, perhaps my sister-in-law's cabin in central Norway. But I imagine the one in the postcard looks very much like the cabin that Clarissa eventually makes her way to near the end of the book. And although I don't remember Rasa giving me this book, she must have. So she must have liked it. And so I read it too.

The book's title, by the way, is the title of a poem by Sami poet Marry A. Somby.