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Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
A beautifully written memoir of a family’s year living in Reykjavik, Iceland that “captures the fierce beauty of the Arctic landscape”—from the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall (Booklist). 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 Kent, England. The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland’s economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary; by the eruption of the volcano 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. Moss explored hillsides of boiling mud and volcanic craters and learned to drive like an Icelander on the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She watched the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds, and as the weeks and months went by, she and her family learned new ways to live. Names for the Sea is her compelling and very funny account of living in a country poised on the edge of Europe, where modernization clashes with living folklore.
370 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 5, 2012
268 people are currently reading
6,310 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Moss
30books1,763followersSarah Moss is the award-winning author of six novels: Cold Earth, Night Waking, selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone, all shortlisted for the prestigious Wellcome Prize, and her new book Ghost Wall, out in September 2018.
She has also written a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2013.
Sarah Moss is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick in England.
She has also written a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2013.
Sarah Moss is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick in England.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 486 reviews
December 2, 2018
Up until this book, I had only read novels, thrillers set in Iceland. Arm chair traveling is the best, especially for those who can't travel as they would like. There are many books that take the reader along on a vacation, a hike, or a canoe trip through various places, and we get a sense of the landscape, some of the residents along the way, maybe a little history, but not in any depth. To do that one has to actually live in the place, which is what was so great about this book.
After traveling through Iceland when she was nineteen, the author had always meant to come back. It takes many years, she marries has two young sons, when an opportunity to teach at the University at Icelsnd opens. So despite some reservations they decide to take the chance. Unfortunately, the timing is off and their residency coincides with hpthe collapse of Iceland's economic structure, called the krepa.
So the reader gets a good look and understanding at exactly how different Iceland is, the difficulty they had adjusting. From the lava fields, to the ocean, the waves, the ice, the cold, bone numbing, but the pictures which I looked up on WIKi, look beautiful. We get to understand their mind set, what they do for fun, in their spare time, their families and how things are aquired when needed. The food, slim pickings on fruit and vegetables, though that is slowly changing, and what they eat instead.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, Moss is a good writer, she writes with clarity and relates her thoughts in a way that is easy to understand. Not simplistic, just explained well, so that the reader comes away understanding what it might be like to live, as a newcomer, in this country. Her sons, of course, adjusted a little easier than their parents, but children often do.
After traveling through Iceland when she was nineteen, the author had always meant to come back. It takes many years, she marries has two young sons, when an opportunity to teach at the University at Icelsnd opens. So despite some reservations they decide to take the chance. Unfortunately, the timing is off and their residency coincides with hpthe collapse of Iceland's economic structure, called the krepa.
So the reader gets a good look and understanding at exactly how different Iceland is, the difficulty they had adjusting. From the lava fields, to the ocean, the waves, the ice, the cold, bone numbing, but the pictures which I looked up on WIKi, look beautiful. We get to understand their mind set, what they do for fun, in their spare time, their families and how things are aquired when needed. The food, slim pickings on fruit and vegetables, though that is slowly changing, and what they eat instead.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, Moss is a good writer, she writes with clarity and relates her thoughts in a way that is easy to understand. Not simplistic, just explained well, so that the reader comes away understanding what it might be like to live, as a newcomer, in this country. Her sons, of course, adjusted a little easier than their parents, but children often do.
March 18, 2014
As an Icelander, currently living in Norway, this book is both satisfying my homesickness and providing me with camaraderie as a foreigner in another land.
I must correct however, Moss' egregious mistake that there is no second-hand market in Iceland. There is indeed, it is just mostly on the internet! I have both bought and sold things like refrigerators, cars and computer equipment via that website. But there even is a charity shop that sells used furniture and items called Góði hirðirinn or the Good Sheperd, where Icelanders put their unwanted items into a special container at the garbage collection place and those things go straight to the charity shop.
Also, regarding fatal car accidents, which Moss seems to imply are more frequent in Iceland than other places, most of those happen outside of the city and are due to road conditions, although I agree with her that people drive cars that are much too big.
It does irritate me at times how afraid she seems to be of everything which makes things seem worse than they are and she played it a bit fast a loose with spelling of Icelandic names (like Hallðór Laxness (correct is Halldór Laxness)! Common, she should know how the Nobel winner's name is spelled and I can't imagine where she got that mistake from.
I otherwise enjoyed the book as it was interesting to see my country with a stranger's eyes. I would give it three and a half stars if I could, due to the above points.
I must correct however, Moss' egregious mistake that there is no second-hand market in Iceland. There is indeed, it is just mostly on the internet! I have both bought and sold things like refrigerators, cars and computer equipment via that website. But there even is a charity shop that sells used furniture and items called Góði hirðirinn or the Good Sheperd, where Icelanders put their unwanted items into a special container at the garbage collection place and those things go straight to the charity shop.
Also, regarding fatal car accidents, which Moss seems to imply are more frequent in Iceland than other places, most of those happen outside of the city and are due to road conditions, although I agree with her that people drive cars that are much too big.
It does irritate me at times how afraid she seems to be of everything which makes things seem worse than they are and she played it a bit fast a loose with spelling of Icelandic names (like Hallðór Laxness (correct is Halldór Laxness)! Common, she should know how the Nobel winner's name is spelled and I can't imagine where she got that mistake from.
I otherwise enjoyed the book as it was interesting to see my country with a stranger's eyes. I would give it three and a half stars if I could, due to the above points.
Read
January 15, 2020This is not exactly a travel book, nor is it exactly a memoir. It is Sarah Moss in Reykjavik for an academic year after the 2008 Global financial crisis.
She has a teaching post in the university of Iceland while on a year's sabbatical from the UK University of Kent, two small boys and a husband, they don't go much beyond Reykjavik, nor even that widely within it.
Mostly she feels out of place and unaccepted, at the same time she is squeamish both about the cuisine and about speaking Icelandic to Icelanders, after some pages I began to get a feel for where the problem was even without the assistance of the Elves or Hidden Folk who I read are said to inhabit parts of Iceland more densely than the humans. With the cuisine I recognise she is some rungs above me on the UK class ladder, she refers to 'blood sausage' as though it is some unheard of monstrosity, I grew up eating it under the name of black pudding and I am bemused by her shock, it seems simple good manners not to waste the animals that die for our eating pleasure. I wonder if she ever ate the slab of whale she bought in the supermarket thinking it was reindeer meat?
It's only fair to say that this is a book which will appeal to you if you have an affinity for Sarah Moss. An interest in Iceland is secondary. Personally I loved it. I was delighted simply by her taking evening walks and noticing the colours of the sky or the angles of the sunlight or how, enchanted, she watched the Northern Lights in the cold. I had a profound sense of her on some barely used footpath around the not entirely completely where she and her gang rented a flat, absorbing the landscape and the sky as though through her skin, this a woman yearning for a winter with "an unparalleled view of the Northern Lights, and no expectation that anyone should do anything other than stay inside reading and eating and watching the sky" (p.345) as she hungers for a little house with big windows on the north coast of Iceland.
Somewhere around the midday point of the book I guess she felt she was going to write this book and she tries to transcend herself by making contact with Icelanders through interviews - a young man from the Independence Party which had governed Iceland since 1944, a woman who can see Elves (most people can't apparently), another woman who believes in Elves, an author, a retired fisherman and his wife, a man who took part in the protests that brought down the government after the financial crisis, and she visits a food bank. She also has a sudden out break of statistics later in the book (a dangerous sign of research intent) finding that Icelanders are as dangerous drivers as she thinks and infrastructure like a tunnel as dangerous due to a lack of maintainence as she had feared, while rates of burglaries and domestic violence seemed curiously high (pp. 296-7).
She admits to being deeply perplexed and generally puzzled by the Icelanders, she watches in a library as many old films as she can and can't follow them at all, they seem to lack any sense of interior life or motivation in their characters, instead there will just be an explosion of violence at some stage just as in the sagas. Reading the book after a while one starts to think of the landscape: volcanos, geysers, storms too fierce for fishing, sudden lava flows, and I wonder if the rule is: as the land so the people. A more Icelandic explanation might be that one of the Hidden people egged on one man to sink his axe into another, I'm not sure if that kind of explanation was put forward to the IMF in the wake of the financial crash.
While in Iceland she searches for the signs of the economic contraction that occurred in Iceland from 2008 and finds it curiously elusive, even though she is living in an uncompleted block of flats, construction on hold indefinitely, they seem to be the only family using the elevator and joke that their children play ball in winter in the underground carpark. Although she thinks of herself as not being accepted, she seems to be operating in a comfortably middle class Reykjavik niche, when she visits the food bank with a student he is also shocked, the milieu of hungry Icelanders who torch their cars when they can't afford the repayments simply isn't one they move in.
Thinking particularly of the giant cars on Iceland's roads imported from the USA she thinks of the country as since 1944 as very much influenced by the USA and governed by a centre-right Republican partyish political party. I felt instantly and saw the freeway from that to the financial crisis with a good splash of for good measure, but of course I do, I like the author have read some Laxness too. The myth of hardy self-reliance is believed in as national fact combined with a deregulated banking sector staffed by people who with insufficient irony think of themselves as Viking raiders, with additional elves on their shoulders urging them to build up capital through dreams and cobwebs, it all made a kind of sense.
It's not exactly a travel book but when she does go and see the lava fields you get to share her wonder as she tells us that a strand of Icelandic opinion finds the idea of planting trees unpatriotic and unpleasantly cosmopolitan.
She has a teaching post in the university of Iceland while on a year's sabbatical from the UK University of Kent, two small boys and a husband, they don't go much beyond Reykjavik, nor even that widely within it.
Mostly she feels out of place and unaccepted, at the same time she is squeamish both about the cuisine and about speaking Icelandic to Icelanders, after some pages I began to get a feel for where the problem was even without the assistance of the Elves or Hidden Folk who I read are said to inhabit parts of Iceland more densely than the humans. With the cuisine I recognise she is some rungs above me on the UK class ladder, she refers to 'blood sausage' as though it is some unheard of monstrosity, I grew up eating it under the name of black pudding and I am bemused by her shock, it seems simple good manners not to waste the animals that die for our eating pleasure. I wonder if she ever ate the slab of whale she bought in the supermarket thinking it was reindeer meat?
It's only fair to say that this is a book which will appeal to you if you have an affinity for Sarah Moss. An interest in Iceland is secondary. Personally I loved it. I was delighted simply by her taking evening walks and noticing the colours of the sky or the angles of the sunlight or how, enchanted, she watched the Northern Lights in the cold. I had a profound sense of her on some barely used footpath around the not entirely completely where she and her gang rented a flat, absorbing the landscape and the sky as though through her skin, this a woman yearning for a winter with "an unparalleled view of the Northern Lights, and no expectation that anyone should do anything other than stay inside reading and eating and watching the sky" (p.345) as she hungers for a little house with big windows on the north coast of Iceland.
Somewhere around the midday point of the book I guess she felt she was going to write this book and she tries to transcend herself by making contact with Icelanders through interviews - a young man from the Independence Party which had governed Iceland since 1944, a woman who can see Elves (most people can't apparently), another woman who believes in Elves, an author, a retired fisherman and his wife, a man who took part in the protests that brought down the government after the financial crisis, and she visits a food bank. She also has a sudden out break of statistics later in the book (a dangerous sign of research intent) finding that Icelanders are as dangerous drivers as she thinks and infrastructure like a tunnel as dangerous due to a lack of maintainence as she had feared, while rates of burglaries and domestic violence seemed curiously high (pp. 296-7).
She admits to being deeply perplexed and generally puzzled by the Icelanders, she watches in a library as many old films as she can and can't follow them at all, they seem to lack any sense of interior life or motivation in their characters, instead there will just be an explosion of violence at some stage just as in the sagas. Reading the book after a while one starts to think of the landscape: volcanos, geysers, storms too fierce for fishing, sudden lava flows, and I wonder if the rule is: as the land so the people. A more Icelandic explanation might be that one of the Hidden people egged on one man to sink his axe into another, I'm not sure if that kind of explanation was put forward to the IMF in the wake of the financial crash.
While in Iceland she searches for the signs of the economic contraction that occurred in Iceland from 2008 and finds it curiously elusive, even though she is living in an uncompleted block of flats, construction on hold indefinitely, they seem to be the only family using the elevator and joke that their children play ball in winter in the underground carpark. Although she thinks of herself as not being accepted, she seems to be operating in a comfortably middle class Reykjavik niche, when she visits the food bank with a student he is also shocked, the milieu of hungry Icelanders who torch their cars when they can't afford the repayments simply isn't one they move in.
Thinking particularly of the giant cars on Iceland's roads imported from the USA she thinks of the country as since 1944 as very much influenced by the USA and governed by a centre-right Republican partyish political party. I felt instantly and saw the freeway from that to the financial crisis with a good splash of for good measure, but of course I do, I like the author have read some Laxness too. The myth of hardy self-reliance is believed in as national fact combined with a deregulated banking sector staffed by people who with insufficient irony think of themselves as Viking raiders, with additional elves on their shoulders urging them to build up capital through dreams and cobwebs, it all made a kind of sense.
It's not exactly a travel book but when she does go and see the lava fields you get to share her wonder as she tells us that a strand of Icelandic opinion finds the idea of planting trees unpatriotic and unpleasantly cosmopolitan.
September 20, 2024
Fascinating memoir of the author’s experience living in Reykjavík, Iceland, with her husband and two young sons. She moved from England in 2009 to take a job teaching 19th century British literature at the University of Iceland. This book provides detailed accounts of what it is like to be a newcomer (which she and the Icelandic people call “foreigner�) to Iceland and how her family adapted. She also covers the weather, landscape, food, recreation, customs, traditions, and cultural norms of the country.
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.
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.
January 23, 2016
It's so much better to learn about a country - in this case, Iceland - from a story or a memoir rather than a guidebook.
In the book. author Sarah Moss (from Kent, England) takes a teaching position at the University of Iceland, family in tow, and records her thoughts, observations, and reactions to the country and its people in beautiful prose. She is hyper-aware of her strangeness in this strange country and her comments reflect her awareness that she is "generalising" when she writes about the Icelanders. And what she writes about them is often times only a way to write about herself, about her interesting reactions to being a foreigner. I loved the part where she writes about how awkward it felt to say the niceties that we English speakers are so used to. She writes: "Takk fyrir mig means literally 'thank you for me', which is what Pétur's ten-year-old granddaughter says in English with startling grace when she has been round for tea. I, too, know these phrases but feel horribly awkward about using them. The artificiality of another culture's set phrases is painful where my own, similarly rehearsed, praise for the cook and requests to be 'excused' for reaching across the table, are entirely natural. It's just so false, says one of my students, all this thanking people and apologising all the time when there's nothing to be grateful or sorry about. It's like Americans telling you to have a nice day when they've never even met you and they really don't give a damn about your day."
The small stuff matters here, precisely because it's the nuance of manners and rituals that separates a visitor from a native. Sarah Moss reveals quite a lot about herself (she is sensitive, poetic, and sometimes oddly fearful, at least to me) as she examines Iceland from her foreigner's perspective. She's at her best in her description of the land's beauty: "We come down past the school, where there are footprints of the children who come to play on the snowy basketball pitch and frozen swings. The sea is silent. There are no birds. Most of the sun is below the lava field now, and the eastern sky is darkening. Careful across the icy playground, we come down to the shore, and there's no movement in the sky or along the beach because the sea is frozen. Instead of waves, there are grey slabs, piled up against each other like fallen gravestones, from the black rocks of the beach to the dimming horizon. I hadn't thought this would happen, hadn't understood that the movement of water and light, the rise and fall of waves, the shifts between lapping and pounding, the coming and going of the tide, could simply stop."
It was a pleasure to read Moss's book. She has precise, attuned perception to her surroundings. I'd love to visit Iceland, but I know I'd never understand the country the way the author came to understand it. My own vision of Iceland is an amalgamation of Björk, geysers, fjords, and unearthly greens. The landscape is haunting, and I would give anything to experience it firsthand.
In the book. author Sarah Moss (from Kent, England) takes a teaching position at the University of Iceland, family in tow, and records her thoughts, observations, and reactions to the country and its people in beautiful prose. She is hyper-aware of her strangeness in this strange country and her comments reflect her awareness that she is "generalising" when she writes about the Icelanders. And what she writes about them is often times only a way to write about herself, about her interesting reactions to being a foreigner. I loved the part where she writes about how awkward it felt to say the niceties that we English speakers are so used to. She writes: "Takk fyrir mig means literally 'thank you for me', which is what Pétur's ten-year-old granddaughter says in English with startling grace when she has been round for tea. I, too, know these phrases but feel horribly awkward about using them. The artificiality of another culture's set phrases is painful where my own, similarly rehearsed, praise for the cook and requests to be 'excused' for reaching across the table, are entirely natural. It's just so false, says one of my students, all this thanking people and apologising all the time when there's nothing to be grateful or sorry about. It's like Americans telling you to have a nice day when they've never even met you and they really don't give a damn about your day."
The small stuff matters here, precisely because it's the nuance of manners and rituals that separates a visitor from a native. Sarah Moss reveals quite a lot about herself (she is sensitive, poetic, and sometimes oddly fearful, at least to me) as she examines Iceland from her foreigner's perspective. She's at her best in her description of the land's beauty: "We come down past the school, where there are footprints of the children who come to play on the snowy basketball pitch and frozen swings. The sea is silent. There are no birds. Most of the sun is below the lava field now, and the eastern sky is darkening. Careful across the icy playground, we come down to the shore, and there's no movement in the sky or along the beach because the sea is frozen. Instead of waves, there are grey slabs, piled up against each other like fallen gravestones, from the black rocks of the beach to the dimming horizon. I hadn't thought this would happen, hadn't understood that the movement of water and light, the rise and fall of waves, the shifts between lapping and pounding, the coming and going of the tide, could simply stop."
It was a pleasure to read Moss's book. She has precise, attuned perception to her surroundings. I'd love to visit Iceland, but I know I'd never understand the country the way the author came to understand it. My own vision of Iceland is an amalgamation of Björk, geysers, fjords, and unearthly greens. The landscape is haunting, and I would give anything to experience it firsthand.
May 28, 2023
Geese are beginning to mass on the waves, their low conversation the bass line to the seagulls' fish-wife screaming on the headland. I'd like to walk on the headland, where there are paths leading to the President's official residence, which looks like a Danish farmhouse deposited in a lava field on the shores of the Arctic sea, but every time I try, the skuas come and mount guard, hanging low over my head and shouting at me to go away, and the seagulls land on the rocks by the faint path and swear as I approach.
I really enjoyed this account of the year Sarah Moss, her husband, and their two young sons spent in Reykjavik while she taught at the University of Iceland. I've not read Moss before, but she's an award-winning novelist and it shows in the lyrical writing throughout, especially when she's describing the land, sea, weather, flora and fauna. Like much of the travel writing that grabs me, this isn't an attempt to document and explicate the whole history and culture of a place. Instead, it's quirky and personal, covering topics from the banal difficulties of setting up affordable housekeeping for four in a not very affordable country, to impressions about the impact of the 2008 kreppa, or banking collapse, the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökul, and deep dives into Icelandic knitting and elves. Recommended.
The goslings have been hatching this week, seizing the short weeks of summer, and they stagger peeping and pecking at clouds of flies. It's not quite midsummer yet, and they have a few weeks to grow their wings before Iceland tilts away from the sun and the nights begin to lengthen, telling them to leave. I'm not ready to go either.
I really enjoyed this account of the year Sarah Moss, her husband, and their two young sons spent in Reykjavik while she taught at the University of Iceland. I've not read Moss before, but she's an award-winning novelist and it shows in the lyrical writing throughout, especially when she's describing the land, sea, weather, flora and fauna. Like much of the travel writing that grabs me, this isn't an attempt to document and explicate the whole history and culture of a place. Instead, it's quirky and personal, covering topics from the banal difficulties of setting up affordable housekeeping for four in a not very affordable country, to impressions about the impact of the 2008 kreppa, or banking collapse, the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökul, and deep dives into Icelandic knitting and elves. Recommended.
The goslings have been hatching this week, seizing the short weeks of summer, and they stagger peeping and pecking at clouds of flies. It's not quite midsummer yet, and they have a few weeks to grow their wings before Iceland tilts away from the sun and the nights begin to lengthen, telling them to leave. I'm not ready to go either.
November 16, 2020
Interesting memoir of the author's year in Iceland with her family. But I'm not convinced, so I'll choose warmer areas when I'm able to travel again.
October 16, 2018
Liked it a lot. The writing in particular was excellent.
March 30, 2016
I picked this up to prep for the trip I've got to Iceland this summer. It was barely okay, unfortunately.
The author is a literature professor who receives an offer to teach English Lit for one year in a university (school?) in Reykjavik. She spends about a chapter romanticizing the Far North (Scotland, etc), but it doesn't seem that she is actually very prepared to go there.
She seems to subscribe very much to the "show don't tell" school of thought, but when you're writing a memoir, you do have to have some sort of commentary on what's happening to you- after all, your perception of what's happening is the content of the memoir. The author tells us that she has a husband and two sons, one a toddler, but I couldn't tell you anything about their personalities. She seems to want to present situations objectively but then let you in on the judgement she makes about those situations. For example, they decide to put the toddler into preschool because the husband finds that he can't work from home with a toddler there. The first school they try subscribes to a very gender-evening school of thought. They separate the sexes to keep things simple and (I think) keep the unconscious bias toward male children from seeping into child care. No toys or books because they want the children to develop imaginations. This is an intriguing idea, to say the least. Neither the author or her husband had any idea about this type of preschool, prevalent in Iceland (apparently). The author gets pretty upset about this, but after the fact, after not doing any research about child care, and after attempting to be dispassionate.
The author seems to have a decidedly mixed attitude toward Iceland. The Romantic Far North doesn't gibe with her negative treatment of what she encounters there. First, the family decides to do without a car. Coming from the Midwest, thinking about pushing a pram over a mile in the snow and wind every time you want to get groceries sounds idiotic to me. Our heroine really seems like a city girl who never considered life without a lot of public transportation. They don't figure out where walking trails are until some time after they move, so end up pushing their stroller along a major road to get anywhere.
The lack of research theme continues. They decide to take an overnight trip to a small island. They make a reservation at a hotel, but when they arrive, "no one is there", (what does that even mean?) so they end up making a stay at a hostel. Do they get their money back? Ever find out what happened? Not as far as I know. They also end up at this island's ferry terminal with no transport to the little town that is their destination, more than a mile away. Are there buses? No. Taxis? No. Even though a full ferry just landed, there is apparently no way to get to this town without a private car. This was when I began to suspect that the author was being a bit creative with her recounting.
Mostly, the author seemed gloomy and disappointed with her experience, intimidated by the new environment and ill prepared to deal with it. I can sympathize with the culture shock of being in a new country to live, but I feel like a bit of time spent with Google would have made her life a lot easier. As it was, I had a hard time with the book.
The author is a literature professor who receives an offer to teach English Lit for one year in a university (school?) in Reykjavik. She spends about a chapter romanticizing the Far North (Scotland, etc), but it doesn't seem that she is actually very prepared to go there.
She seems to subscribe very much to the "show don't tell" school of thought, but when you're writing a memoir, you do have to have some sort of commentary on what's happening to you- after all, your perception of what's happening is the content of the memoir. The author tells us that she has a husband and two sons, one a toddler, but I couldn't tell you anything about their personalities. She seems to want to present situations objectively but then let you in on the judgement she makes about those situations. For example, they decide to put the toddler into preschool because the husband finds that he can't work from home with a toddler there. The first school they try subscribes to a very gender-evening school of thought. They separate the sexes to keep things simple and (I think) keep the unconscious bias toward male children from seeping into child care. No toys or books because they want the children to develop imaginations. This is an intriguing idea, to say the least. Neither the author or her husband had any idea about this type of preschool, prevalent in Iceland (apparently). The author gets pretty upset about this, but after the fact, after not doing any research about child care, and after attempting to be dispassionate.
The author seems to have a decidedly mixed attitude toward Iceland. The Romantic Far North doesn't gibe with her negative treatment of what she encounters there. First, the family decides to do without a car. Coming from the Midwest, thinking about pushing a pram over a mile in the snow and wind every time you want to get groceries sounds idiotic to me. Our heroine really seems like a city girl who never considered life without a lot of public transportation. They don't figure out where walking trails are until some time after they move, so end up pushing their stroller along a major road to get anywhere.
The lack of research theme continues. They decide to take an overnight trip to a small island. They make a reservation at a hotel, but when they arrive, "no one is there", (what does that even mean?) so they end up making a stay at a hostel. Do they get their money back? Ever find out what happened? Not as far as I know. They also end up at this island's ferry terminal with no transport to the little town that is their destination, more than a mile away. Are there buses? No. Taxis? No. Even though a full ferry just landed, there is apparently no way to get to this town without a private car. This was when I began to suspect that the author was being a bit creative with her recounting.
Mostly, the author seemed gloomy and disappointed with her experience, intimidated by the new environment and ill prepared to deal with it. I can sympathize with the culture shock of being in a new country to live, but I feel like a bit of time spent with Google would have made her life a lot easier. As it was, I had a hard time with the book.
August 26, 2024
I used to love this type of memoir - someone picks up their entire life and moves it to a foreign country for a while - and it turns out I still do! On this occasion it's Sarah Moss, a novelist whom I already admired, taking her young family to Iceland for a year. The timing is critical, too, as they arrive just as the kreppa (the collapse of the Icelandic economy) is beginning to really pinch. This means that Moss's academic role at the National University in Reykjavik is not enough to elevate the family from the ranks of 'the poor', while her husband stays home to care for their toddler.
Moss's observations of life as a foreigner in Reykjavik at that time are always interesting, and frankly, often quite anxious. I guess it highlights the differences in culture/attitude towards things like personal safety.
I'm not sure how they imagined it would work to live in such an extreme environment for an entire year without their own car, but kudos to them for seeing the light and getting hold of a sturdy Volvo. But then - they don't really go anywhere! At least not until the holiday they take in Iceland a year after they return to England. So for most of the book, the reader is treated to a good dose of Reykjavik life, but not a lot of the rest of the country until later.
Overall it was a good read, but I admit to skimming a bit when confronted with elves for the second chapter in a row (but then no more elves after that).
Moss's observations of life as a foreigner in Reykjavik at that time are always interesting, and frankly, often quite anxious. I guess it highlights the differences in culture/attitude towards things like personal safety.
I'm not sure how they imagined it would work to live in such an extreme environment for an entire year without their own car, but kudos to them for seeing the light and getting hold of a sturdy Volvo. But then - they don't really go anywhere! At least not until the holiday they take in Iceland a year after they return to England. So for most of the book, the reader is treated to a good dose of Reykjavik life, but not a lot of the rest of the country until later.
Overall it was a good read, but I admit to skimming a bit when confronted with elves for the second chapter in a row (but then no more elves after that).
September 21, 2015
How does this have 4 stars? Sarah Moss is clearly a good writer, but this book pissed me off from beginning to end. It should really be called "Strangers in Reykjavik who are too damn scared to drive anywhere else in the country." It felt like she spent the whole book complaining about how terrifying Icelandic drivers and roads are. Seriously, that felt like the whole thrust of the book sometimes. Having just spent some time in Iceland, in both Reykjavik and the rest of the country, I DO NOT understand her fear. Driving in Reykjavik felt like driving in any other city, and the rest of the country was a complete non-issue. She and her family lived in Iceland for a year and never made it more than 50 kilometers from the city! I felt like this book barely skimmed the surface of Iceland. It was more about the author's hang-ups and fears than about any real look at Icelandic culture, landscape, food, or anything else. I'm glad I read this AFTER my trip to Iceland and not before. What a disappointment!
September 13, 2016
I picked up this book in advance of travelling to Iceland, hoping to learn more about Icelandic culture and life. At first I found it fascinating. Then I went to Iceland and found the book lacking in several ways. But mostly, the book suffered from the author's own biases and odd fixations.
In 2009, Moss took a one year contract as a professor at the University of Iceland. She and her husband moved to Reykjavik with their two small children but never seem to get comfortable being there.
The main thing Moss obsesses over is cars. She attempts, at first, to live in Iceland without a car, something that baffles the locals and defies logic. She bemoans the fact that she cannot walk and push her stroller comfortably everywhere and that Reykjavik has spotty and unpopular public transit. She is amazed that almost everyone owns a car and sees it as a height of luxury. She is terrified of driving and cars in general and repeatedly - throughout the entire book - claims Icelandic drivers are terribly dangerous. She eventually gives in and gets a car and feels compelled to mention her discomfort with it repeatedly.
All I kept thinking is, boy, would she be in for a shock if she ever drove in North America.
Imagine my surprise when we arrive in Iceland and encounter some of the nicest driving anywhere. No crazy drivers, no daring passes on two-lane country roads. It fact, it was lovely driving in Reykjavik and the countryside. However, on several occasions in the countryside, I felt I would never want to drive there in the winter, not because the roads were unkempt but because having car trouble in such a remote place in bad snow...a 4x4 wouldn't seem like a luxury then.
Another of Moss' blind spots is in regards to Icelandic household finances. Moss arrives near the beginning of the kreppa, Iceland's financial collapse in which all three national banks defaulted. There are still signs of the recent wealth but also many signs of lost wealth such as vacant homes and abandoned property development. She and her husband find money extremely tight and the cost of living very high in Iceland. It's true that Iceland is very expensive: I've never paid so much for basic food in my life! But she seems to forget a fact she writes about herself: almost all women in Iceland work, even if they have children.
Childcare is subsidized and many young people have their parents available for childcare. Iceland is still a family-oriented society: it's small enough it would be tough to not be aware of your family's activities. Moss is amazed that many of her students are already parents: in England, as in Canada, most women wait until establishing their career before starting a family.
The kreppa meant a lot of unemployment for everyone. This was a tough time for Iceland with few good jobs to be had. But the expectation was that both parents worked. Moss never bothers to write about her husband's activities: for all we know, he's making butter sculptures in their shed. But it seems like he never had a work visa and the author's income was all they had. I have to assume that having only one income and two children in a dual-income economy means money is going to be tight but Moss never acknowledges that this could be part of their financial stress.
Another strange statement she makes is that Icelandic people abhor all things secondhand. She makes it sound as if everyone in England rejoices for vintage and nobody every wants to buy anything new. I can't validate English attitudes, but I suspect Icelanders are a lot like Canadians: a pre-used bargain is nice but it's even nicer when you can afford brand new.
Moss makes many other strange observations. One is her surprise that people aren't hanging about outdoors. One moment she'll declare the streets are empty, that there is no sign of humanity in a small town. The next she describes a gust of wind so strong she can't open her car door. In a country that rarely reaches 20C in the summer, is it really any wonder that they Iceland people don't loiter outdoors?
I did appreciated Moss noting Iceland's apparent amnesia about how some of the country's settlers arrived. About 70% of the DNA of female settlers was from Britain; 70% of the DNA of male settlers were from Norway. Most of the women who settled Iceland were women who were kidnapped and married off to Viking men. Icelanders are very proud of their Viking history, as they should be, but this feels like a comfortable oversight. I came across this myself in a Reykjavik museum where it was mentioned almost as a footnote with no other context.
My biggest disappointment with this book is the author's lack of curiosity about the physical land in which she lived for a year. She spends time researching Icelandic film, literature and history, from the comfort of her office or library. She rarely leaves Reykjavik and seems terrified when doing so (cars=death, landscape=fear). She's bashful during interactions with Icelanders because she cannot speak their language comfortably. (She makes little effort to try, however, Icelandic is a difficult language for English speakers to master.) The last chapter of the book is her family's return to Iceland one year after leaving for home. I got the sense her editor said, look here: nothing much happens in your book. Why don't you return, get off the beaten path and write some nice travelogue piece about the country to satisfy travel readers? Too little, too late for me. I loved Iceland and my whole family would love to return. Although Moss makes some interesting cultural observations, this isn't a book I'd recommend to someone looking to learn more about Iceland.
In 2009, Moss took a one year contract as a professor at the University of Iceland. She and her husband moved to Reykjavik with their two small children but never seem to get comfortable being there.
The main thing Moss obsesses over is cars. She attempts, at first, to live in Iceland without a car, something that baffles the locals and defies logic. She bemoans the fact that she cannot walk and push her stroller comfortably everywhere and that Reykjavik has spotty and unpopular public transit. She is amazed that almost everyone owns a car and sees it as a height of luxury. She is terrified of driving and cars in general and repeatedly - throughout the entire book - claims Icelandic drivers are terribly dangerous. She eventually gives in and gets a car and feels compelled to mention her discomfort with it repeatedly.
All I kept thinking is, boy, would she be in for a shock if she ever drove in North America.
Imagine my surprise when we arrive in Iceland and encounter some of the nicest driving anywhere. No crazy drivers, no daring passes on two-lane country roads. It fact, it was lovely driving in Reykjavik and the countryside. However, on several occasions in the countryside, I felt I would never want to drive there in the winter, not because the roads were unkempt but because having car trouble in such a remote place in bad snow...a 4x4 wouldn't seem like a luxury then.
Another of Moss' blind spots is in regards to Icelandic household finances. Moss arrives near the beginning of the kreppa, Iceland's financial collapse in which all three national banks defaulted. There are still signs of the recent wealth but also many signs of lost wealth such as vacant homes and abandoned property development. She and her husband find money extremely tight and the cost of living very high in Iceland. It's true that Iceland is very expensive: I've never paid so much for basic food in my life! But she seems to forget a fact she writes about herself: almost all women in Iceland work, even if they have children.
Childcare is subsidized and many young people have their parents available for childcare. Iceland is still a family-oriented society: it's small enough it would be tough to not be aware of your family's activities. Moss is amazed that many of her students are already parents: in England, as in Canada, most women wait until establishing their career before starting a family.
The kreppa meant a lot of unemployment for everyone. This was a tough time for Iceland with few good jobs to be had. But the expectation was that both parents worked. Moss never bothers to write about her husband's activities: for all we know, he's making butter sculptures in their shed. But it seems like he never had a work visa and the author's income was all they had. I have to assume that having only one income and two children in a dual-income economy means money is going to be tight but Moss never acknowledges that this could be part of their financial stress.
Another strange statement she makes is that Icelandic people abhor all things secondhand. She makes it sound as if everyone in England rejoices for vintage and nobody every wants to buy anything new. I can't validate English attitudes, but I suspect Icelanders are a lot like Canadians: a pre-used bargain is nice but it's even nicer when you can afford brand new.
Moss makes many other strange observations. One is her surprise that people aren't hanging about outdoors. One moment she'll declare the streets are empty, that there is no sign of humanity in a small town. The next she describes a gust of wind so strong she can't open her car door. In a country that rarely reaches 20C in the summer, is it really any wonder that they Iceland people don't loiter outdoors?
I did appreciated Moss noting Iceland's apparent amnesia about how some of the country's settlers arrived. About 70% of the DNA of female settlers was from Britain; 70% of the DNA of male settlers were from Norway. Most of the women who settled Iceland were women who were kidnapped and married off to Viking men. Icelanders are very proud of their Viking history, as they should be, but this feels like a comfortable oversight. I came across this myself in a Reykjavik museum where it was mentioned almost as a footnote with no other context.
My biggest disappointment with this book is the author's lack of curiosity about the physical land in which she lived for a year. She spends time researching Icelandic film, literature and history, from the comfort of her office or library. She rarely leaves Reykjavik and seems terrified when doing so (cars=death, landscape=fear). She's bashful during interactions with Icelanders because she cannot speak their language comfortably. (She makes little effort to try, however, Icelandic is a difficult language for English speakers to master.) The last chapter of the book is her family's return to Iceland one year after leaving for home. I got the sense her editor said, look here: nothing much happens in your book. Why don't you return, get off the beaten path and write some nice travelogue piece about the country to satisfy travel readers? Too little, too late for me. I loved Iceland and my whole family would love to return. Although Moss makes some interesting cultural observations, this isn't a book I'd recommend to someone looking to learn more about Iceland.
November 12, 2017
I’m not sure what the experience of reading Sarah Moss’s book would be for someone who has never visited Iceland; this is probably not the book to read as a typical travelogue or guide to the country but rather more of a memoir of her year abroad. I imagine though it would still be thoroughly enjoyable as the prose is so engaging and easy to read, and she is both funny and insightful about the land and the people of Iceland.
For me, however, this was an especially wonderful book as I lived in Iceland on and off for two years between 1999 and 2003. I found myself nodding along and smiling at a lot of what she wrote, particularly about the Icelandic character. The sometimes stony facade that soon disappears once you are familiar and conceals warmth and generosity, the independence and love of their country as well as their desire to travel and live abroad.
What I especially enjoyed about the book was not only what was familiar, but what had occurred since I left, in particular the ‘kreppa� or collapse of the Icelandic banks, when the whole world was experiencing recession and economic hardship. I was on the other side of the planet then and never really got a good picture of what was occurring in Iceland at the time, although I do remember being proud of my friends who were taking a stand politically, showing how such change can be achieved when the majority of the country is of one opinion.
There are things that most people will already know: Iceland is expensive, it’s cold but not that cold, it’s volcanic –a whole chapter on Eyjafjalljokull will remind you of that, but there is much that might be less well known. Many people might not know about the spiritual side to Iceland, particular the pagan or mystical element. I don’t think we needed two chapters about Icelandic beliefs in elves and other spirits, but the chapters about individuals like Vilborg show how these beliefs can coexist with a highly educated and intelligent people. Indeed Moss’s quest to understand, the Icelandic character and culture, revealing aspects of herself along the way, is compelling. It is clear she loves the country itself even though it is not until the very last chapter, when she is actually holidaying in Iceland that she goes much beyond Reykjavik. Before this she still manages to write eloquently about her nightly walks on the shore, the birdlife, the almost surreal and magical quality of the Icelandic volcanic landscape.
She does make sweeping generalizations on occasion but personal opinions are part of any travelogue and this has to be taken into account in their reading. It’s nice, however, to read a ‘travel� book where the author is not an intrepid, confident individual. It’s often amusing how unadventurous and reticent she is about driving outside of the city and meeting new people –always with that British unease about “being too much trouble� . Because of this reticence and because when you live and work in a new country, you don’t always get to take advantage of much of the tourist experience, this separate trip is the only writing that shows us much of the country beyond Reykjavik. Prior to this however, you do get to see areas and go into the homes of people you would never get to meet on a two week holiday, and it is in this more personal experience of this amazing country and its people that make this book shine.
For me, however, this was an especially wonderful book as I lived in Iceland on and off for two years between 1999 and 2003. I found myself nodding along and smiling at a lot of what she wrote, particularly about the Icelandic character. The sometimes stony facade that soon disappears once you are familiar and conceals warmth and generosity, the independence and love of their country as well as their desire to travel and live abroad.
What I especially enjoyed about the book was not only what was familiar, but what had occurred since I left, in particular the ‘kreppa� or collapse of the Icelandic banks, when the whole world was experiencing recession and economic hardship. I was on the other side of the planet then and never really got a good picture of what was occurring in Iceland at the time, although I do remember being proud of my friends who were taking a stand politically, showing how such change can be achieved when the majority of the country is of one opinion.
There are things that most people will already know: Iceland is expensive, it’s cold but not that cold, it’s volcanic –a whole chapter on Eyjafjalljokull will remind you of that, but there is much that might be less well known. Many people might not know about the spiritual side to Iceland, particular the pagan or mystical element. I don’t think we needed two chapters about Icelandic beliefs in elves and other spirits, but the chapters about individuals like Vilborg show how these beliefs can coexist with a highly educated and intelligent people. Indeed Moss’s quest to understand, the Icelandic character and culture, revealing aspects of herself along the way, is compelling. It is clear she loves the country itself even though it is not until the very last chapter, when she is actually holidaying in Iceland that she goes much beyond Reykjavik. Before this she still manages to write eloquently about her nightly walks on the shore, the birdlife, the almost surreal and magical quality of the Icelandic volcanic landscape.
She does make sweeping generalizations on occasion but personal opinions are part of any travelogue and this has to be taken into account in their reading. It’s nice, however, to read a ‘travel� book where the author is not an intrepid, confident individual. It’s often amusing how unadventurous and reticent she is about driving outside of the city and meeting new people –always with that British unease about “being too much trouble� . Because of this reticence and because when you live and work in a new country, you don’t always get to take advantage of much of the tourist experience, this separate trip is the only writing that shows us much of the country beyond Reykjavik. Prior to this however, you do get to see areas and go into the homes of people you would never get to meet on a two week holiday, and it is in this more personal experience of this amazing country and its people that make this book shine.
September 23, 2023
After exhausting Moss's entire fictional output back to back to back, I was a bit hesitant about reading this memoir of the year she and her family spent in Iceland, since I don't cotton much to non-fiction, and it sounded a bit ... dreary? The good news is that even though I often found the story less than thrilling, Moss seems incapable of writing dull prose, so when the 'plot' wasn't grabbing me, I could still appreciate the lyrical writing.
But therein lies the rub - as in most books of this nature, Moss overestimates just how much detail we can stomach about her day to day existence, and while SOME of the stories she relates can be interesting and/or amusing (the highlight being her interview with the woman who's an elf expert), too many pages are along the lines of 'we drove here, and saw that, and the children misbehaved, and the roads were awful, and the weather sucked'. Yawn. [However, it rapidly becomes apparent that the two mischievous children in her novel Night Waking are most definitely modeled after her two real sons.]
However, the seven novels she's written so far were all excellent, so it was worth giving this a try - I'll just have to wait for novel #8 - she's quite prolific, so hopefully it won't be long....
But therein lies the rub - as in most books of this nature, Moss overestimates just how much detail we can stomach about her day to day existence, and while SOME of the stories she relates can be interesting and/or amusing (the highlight being her interview with the woman who's an elf expert), too many pages are along the lines of 'we drove here, and saw that, and the children misbehaved, and the roads were awful, and the weather sucked'. Yawn. [However, it rapidly becomes apparent that the two mischievous children in her novel Night Waking are most definitely modeled after her two real sons.]
However, the seven novels she's written so far were all excellent, so it was worth giving this a try - I'll just have to wait for novel #8 - she's quite prolific, so hopefully it won't be long....
April 12, 2015
Where's the passion?! This book is beautifully written, let there be no doubt about that. It's lyrical, measured, thoughtful - but at no stage did I ever get a visceral sense of what it is to up and leave everything you know and love for life in an alien country. I can see how she tried to convey the why - the romantic memories of a teenage roadtrip, a powerful, lifelong affinity with the Nordic isles - but the how, the what and the next never quite works. It's too studied, really.
As someone who also loves Iceland, and writing, and who has dreamed themselves of giving it all up one day to move out there - I was looking forward to a heartfelt, inspiring account of life for an ex-pat in Iceland. I got a beautiful, careful, restrained travelog. She took the mantra of "show, don't tell" too far here - I was aching to understand more about the feelings behind the events, but everything was so carefully showcased - it was nothing more than a series of dipinti, of sketches.
As someone who also loves Iceland, and writing, and who has dreamed themselves of giving it all up one day to move out there - I was looking forward to a heartfelt, inspiring account of life for an ex-pat in Iceland. I got a beautiful, careful, restrained travelog. She took the mantra of "show, don't tell" too far here - I was aching to understand more about the feelings behind the events, but everything was so carefully showcased - it was nothing more than a series of dipinti, of sketches.
August 14, 2022
Interesting observations on Iceland around the time of its banking crisis. The author actually lived there for a year, with her family. She observed many quirky phenomena that had been 'known' for a while. However, once she also experienced things, such as a food bank, that even the middle class Icelanders seemed unaware of. Furthermore, looking at the cold statistics, she discovered that reality often did not match the common image. E.g. the crime rate was comparable to other Nordic countries, and not negligeable as was commonly claimed. An entertaining read and recommended to anyone interested in the country.
May 10, 2018
A disappointing look at Iceland. I found it utterly amazing that the author spent a year in Iceland and barely moved from Reykjavik. Given how awesome the landscape is there it is hard to fathom that she did not explore it further and therefore could not gain a full understanding of the country and its people. Whilst her descriptions of the changing seasons is evocative one gains the impression that she did not embrace the community in which she spent a year, too embarrassed to try to speak the language, and writes as if making a critique of the people and its culture. Disappointing.
January 21, 2018
I've always felt lured by Iceland, so this memoir by Sarah Moss was a vicarious delight! In it, Moss details her move to Iceland with her husband and two young sons, describing various aspects of Icelandic life � the food (salted fish, potatoes, skyr, blood pudding and liver sausage), the education (with its emphasis on outdoor play and creativity), the importance of family networks ("you can't do anything here without a clan"), the idiosyncrasies of the language (there is no word for "please" in Icelandic and "thank you" is rarely used too), and the significance of the unseen world to the national psyche (when deciding where to build roads, for example, the Department of Transport consults mediums who speak to the elves and hidden people, asking for permission).
Moss does not shy away from detailing the hardships of life in Iceland too � particularly, the difficulty of integrating in a country where people do not speak to strangers, the challenges of finding fresh fruit and vegetables, and the daunting task of entertaining two small children indoors on dark winter weekends.
What makes this memoir so special is the author's highly analytical mind, her insights into cultural minutiae and her beautiful, poetic prose. Unlike many books of the travel memoir genre which tend to be light and humorous in style (e.g. the Year of Living Danishly, The Geography of Bliss) this is a memoir of a more somber persuasion, exploring chosen topics in detail, investigating both sides of a debate or issue, and sidestepping easy conclusions.
While the pace of the story was at times bogged down by the level of detail included, this was overall an absorbing and fascinating account of migration and cultural adaptation.
Mood: Thoughtful, analytical
Rating: 7/10
Also on Instagram:
Moss does not shy away from detailing the hardships of life in Iceland too � particularly, the difficulty of integrating in a country where people do not speak to strangers, the challenges of finding fresh fruit and vegetables, and the daunting task of entertaining two small children indoors on dark winter weekends.
What makes this memoir so special is the author's highly analytical mind, her insights into cultural minutiae and her beautiful, poetic prose. Unlike many books of the travel memoir genre which tend to be light and humorous in style (e.g. the Year of Living Danishly, The Geography of Bliss) this is a memoir of a more somber persuasion, exploring chosen topics in detail, investigating both sides of a debate or issue, and sidestepping easy conclusions.
While the pace of the story was at times bogged down by the level of detail included, this was overall an absorbing and fascinating account of migration and cultural adaptation.
Mood: Thoughtful, analytical
Rating: 7/10
Also on Instagram:
March 23, 2020
�There must be a better reason to travel, a better way of travelling, than the hoarding of sights your friends haven’t seen. I’m also, I find, resistant to the lens of the ‘student of prose and conduct� who finds ‘places to visit� because of historical events. I don’t want to see the bath of the great historian. I don’t want to know that the great historian had a bath. I want to sense the long-dead outlaw’s dread of the dark, not to be told about it in an interpretation centre. I want, I suppose, an unmediated Iceland, even though I know there’s no such thing.�
November 9, 2015
I've been a bit fascinated by Iceland, which has become more pronounced since reading Burial Rites nearly a year ago now. I saw this book being mentioned around the blogosphere, and grabbed it when it was on sale on Kindle. I've never moved overseas, though it looked like I would for a while, and that was daunting enough. I can't imagine doing it with kids in tow, and to such an alien landscape such as Iceland.
I understand the anxiety that Sarah felt about the move, and the new beginning, as well as the unfamiliarity of it all, and I appreciate her sharing it with us- it made me feel a bit like I was having a conversation with a friend. I too become anxious in new places.
I feel a bit like her anxiety was to the book's detriment, which is unfortunate. As a reader, and as someone who hasn't been to Northern Europe, I wanted her to tell me how the whale meat tasted (there was quite a long lead up to her trying whale meat, which fell flat at the last second) and what it's like to eat burnt sheep head. I wanted her to really describe Reykjavik's main street and talk more about the wildlife. She wasn't exactly willing to go out of her culinary comfort zone though, which really disappointed me, especially when she specifically talks about these foods.
I suppose I'll eat anything though... I've never had much time for fussy eaters!
I also felt like her anxiety about situations and meeting people, while perfectly understandable, was almost a disabling quality. We'd get a build up to her doing something new, but it wouldn't happen. She'd relate a second hand story from a friend instead of trying it herself. So much of the "action" of the story was the family going about their daily lives (as families tend to do!) but not going much further than the sea wall. By the three quarter mark, I was bored silly. Her disbelief in the fairies and elves made me feel a bit bad for the women she spoke to, as they were helping her with her book and she borderline makes fun of them (particularly the first lady). I understand the feeling of thinking someone odd, but she just seemed totally unwilling to suspend disbelief.
However, the final quarter kind of picked up. I enjoyed the section on Icelandic knitting,
and their trip around the island, but it was too little, too late to save the book. I would have liked her to try knitting in the Icelandic fashion, to see whether it is easier than British knitting or not. She kind of lined that section up and never kicked off, so to speak.
I'm going to give this a 3.5 star mark, because I did finish it, so
it can't be too bad, and because Sarah is actually aware of her anxiety and her inability to relax about life. She admits it readily throughout the book, and in some ways it made her more relatable to me, but in other ways it made me feel like she was blocking my understanding of Icelandic life. I grabbed this as the first book I read after my thesis, and it did kind of help me ease into reading. I wish she'd included a reading list in the back of the book, so I could read more Icelandic literature!
I also think that Sarah Moss' living in Reykjavik for a year helped a book a lot, as it felt more settled, and not like an extended Lonely Planet introduction. For someone with perhaps more patience and understanding of being a mother than I do, and perhaps with less of a specific idea of what they want to know, this book would be perfect. It's not awful by any stretch of the imagination, and Moss has done a good job on most aspects of the book.
I understand the anxiety that Sarah felt about the move, and the new beginning, as well as the unfamiliarity of it all, and I appreciate her sharing it with us- it made me feel a bit like I was having a conversation with a friend. I too become anxious in new places.
I feel a bit like her anxiety was to the book's detriment, which is unfortunate. As a reader, and as someone who hasn't been to Northern Europe, I wanted her to tell me how the whale meat tasted (there was quite a long lead up to her trying whale meat, which fell flat at the last second) and what it's like to eat burnt sheep head. I wanted her to really describe Reykjavik's main street and talk more about the wildlife. She wasn't exactly willing to go out of her culinary comfort zone though, which really disappointed me, especially when she specifically talks about these foods.
I suppose I'll eat anything though... I've never had much time for fussy eaters!
I also felt like her anxiety about situations and meeting people, while perfectly understandable, was almost a disabling quality. We'd get a build up to her doing something new, but it wouldn't happen. She'd relate a second hand story from a friend instead of trying it herself. So much of the "action" of the story was the family going about their daily lives (as families tend to do!) but not going much further than the sea wall. By the three quarter mark, I was bored silly. Her disbelief in the fairies and elves made me feel a bit bad for the women she spoke to, as they were helping her with her book and she borderline makes fun of them (particularly the first lady). I understand the feeling of thinking someone odd, but she just seemed totally unwilling to suspend disbelief.
However, the final quarter kind of picked up. I enjoyed the section on Icelandic knitting,
and their trip around the island, but it was too little, too late to save the book. I would have liked her to try knitting in the Icelandic fashion, to see whether it is easier than British knitting or not. She kind of lined that section up and never kicked off, so to speak.
I'm going to give this a 3.5 star mark, because I did finish it, so
it can't be too bad, and because Sarah is actually aware of her anxiety and her inability to relax about life. She admits it readily throughout the book, and in some ways it made her more relatable to me, but in other ways it made me feel like she was blocking my understanding of Icelandic life. I grabbed this as the first book I read after my thesis, and it did kind of help me ease into reading. I wish she'd included a reading list in the back of the book, so I could read more Icelandic literature!
I also think that Sarah Moss' living in Reykjavik for a year helped a book a lot, as it felt more settled, and not like an extended Lonely Planet introduction. For someone with perhaps more patience and understanding of being a mother than I do, and perhaps with less of a specific idea of what they want to know, this book would be perfect. It's not awful by any stretch of the imagination, and Moss has done a good job on most aspects of the book.
August 14, 2019
Ahoy there mateys! I just finished ghost wall and didn't know that book was by this author. I tried to read this memoir before I went to Iceland and found it rather boring. The beginning talks about the author's summer trip to the country when she was 19 before getting into her time living there. I didn't even make it past that summer portion. I returned the book to the library with the intention of never picking it up again. Now that I have read ghost wall (still pondering), she does seem to have an odd writing style that might not be for me. Arrr!
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Check out me other reviews at
December 31, 2019
Hardback published in 2012. Very good overall, she's a good writer. Some nicely crafted sentences. I wish I could write like her!
May 16, 2013
Really enjoyed this and was sorry to get to the end. I am one of those people who has harboured a secret(ish) obsession with Iceland and Norway from early teens, and originally planned to do something serious about it but got led down other paths and have never actually fulfilled those dreams. I still hanker after it or something like it - nearest so far being sailing in a former trawler round the Hebrides, and listening to my grandparents' rather wistful stories about Shetland, where they spent three years when newly married. Anyway, this book tells you what it is actually like for someone from the UK to live there (albeit temporarily - the author was considering a more permanent move with her family but in the event only stayed for a year, partly due to the financial crisis). I still love the idea, even if it is now very unlikely to happen in my case, but this book is a bit of an eye-opener about aspects of Icelandic life which Britons might find difficult. Top of the list for me would be the big cars, scary driving habits (if the author is to be believed - and the statistics support her, with the road death rate per capita twice as high as that in Britain despite the small population and less crowded roads), and lack of public transport especially outside Reykjavik. (What happens if you really can't drive? Total isolation?) Other aspects which might take some getting used to would be the more expected ones (the dark nights in the winter, the weather, the lack of fruit and choice of food, the expense). It's surprising to read about the apparent lack of a secondhand market and even a sense of shame and horror at the idea of such a thing, when many people in the UK, me included, have homes full of secondhand furniture and clothes (what happens to things otherwise? Is there a really huge landfill site in Iceland?) She does not say a great deal about the language, which I imagine I would have tried to learn if it had been me (but then, how easy is that when everybody's English is always going to be better than your Icelandic could ever be?) The book is beautifully written, and despite the fact that she didn't stay in the end you can tell that she writes with a real love for the country and respect for its traditions, even if on occasion bemused. This book has also made me want to reread Auden (tingle-down-the-spine factor in the poem she quotes from "Letters from Iceland"). She seems less keen on William Morris, but I think he might bear reinvestigation - especially as he may have influenced Rudyard Kipling, whose "Puck of Pook's Hill" stories sound so like the Icelandic elves. Lots of food for thought here, and she may have helped rekindle my teenage dreams. (Oh dear! Too late!) Some pictures would have been nice.
October 23, 2015
I thought I would love this book. As someone who has always felt a pull and a romantic interest in all things Icelandic, Scandinavian and 'North', this account of an English uni lecturer seemed right up my street. However, it's a wee bit of a disappointing read.
The author is so self-absorbed; chapters upon chapters of ruminating and wondering and then comparing (in a semi judgemental way, most of the time). Nothing really seems to happen. I understand that the author moves to Iceland just after the financial collapse, and her salary is cut by a third leaving her less comfortable than usual. But that shouldn't have stopped her freezing up and feeling ashamed of her status! It seems like a complete waste of a year in one of the most interesting countries in the world - it doesn't cost a krona to have meaningful conversations and build connections.
The author is too shy to speak to locals, too embarrassed to show that she isn't a born and bred Icelander. But she seems to revel in her foreign-ness, and make no real attempt to assimilate herself in the culture or with locals, and go out and actually do anything! This attitude doesn't make for an entertaining read.
The account picks up nearer the end after a lot of waffly chapters in the middle. I did enjoy the chapters on the food banks, knitting and the elves.
There are some decent descriptions in the book, but I can't help but feel unsatisfied.
The author is so self-absorbed; chapters upon chapters of ruminating and wondering and then comparing (in a semi judgemental way, most of the time). Nothing really seems to happen. I understand that the author moves to Iceland just after the financial collapse, and her salary is cut by a third leaving her less comfortable than usual. But that shouldn't have stopped her freezing up and feeling ashamed of her status! It seems like a complete waste of a year in one of the most interesting countries in the world - it doesn't cost a krona to have meaningful conversations and build connections.
The author is too shy to speak to locals, too embarrassed to show that she isn't a born and bred Icelander. But she seems to revel in her foreign-ness, and make no real attempt to assimilate herself in the culture or with locals, and go out and actually do anything! This attitude doesn't make for an entertaining read.
The account picks up nearer the end after a lot of waffly chapters in the middle. I did enjoy the chapters on the food banks, knitting and the elves.
There are some decent descriptions in the book, but I can't help but feel unsatisfied.
December 11, 2018
Enjoyed learning about Iceland. Had major problems with the author's persona.
February 13, 2023
NAMES FOR THE SEA. STRANGERS IN ICELAND (2012). Sarah Moss is a British academic and writer who took a university job in Reykjavik for one year. She had visited Iceland before during one summer, and for a long time she yearned to return and live there for a while. So this book is her account of her year in Rejkjavik.
Moss, her husband and their two young children arrived in 2009, following the financial crisis. Due to this crisis the value of Moss’s salary was halved before she even arrived. They were not poor, but they had to be extremely austere.
NAMES FOR THE SEA is not a travel book, but an insightful account of the difficulties of living abroad for a year. The splendor of the landscape, the extreme weather are captured beautifully. Then we have the cultural shocks: food was one of them as very little fresh fruit and vegetables were available. Her description of the terrifying traffic is particularly funny as well as her account of the national widespread belief in elves (!!) and the obsession with knitting. While reading Laxness I was puzzled because I found that even children, boys and girls, spent time knitting for hours. Of course, elves and similar "beings" dutifully appear all the time in Independent People. This book helped me to make sense of many things I did not quite understand in Laxness's novel.
This is a charming, candid memoir which focuses on the people the author meets and on the challenges of settling in to a very different culture from one's own. Moss is a perceptive and thoughtful observer and her account is a witty, vicarious delight.
Moss, her husband and their two young children arrived in 2009, following the financial crisis. Due to this crisis the value of Moss’s salary was halved before she even arrived. They were not poor, but they had to be extremely austere.
NAMES FOR THE SEA is not a travel book, but an insightful account of the difficulties of living abroad for a year. The splendor of the landscape, the extreme weather are captured beautifully. Then we have the cultural shocks: food was one of them as very little fresh fruit and vegetables were available. Her description of the terrifying traffic is particularly funny as well as her account of the national widespread belief in elves (!!) and the obsession with knitting. While reading Laxness I was puzzled because I found that even children, boys and girls, spent time knitting for hours. Of course, elves and similar "beings" dutifully appear all the time in Independent People. This book helped me to make sense of many things I did not quite understand in Laxness's novel.
This is a charming, candid memoir which focuses on the people the author meets and on the challenges of settling in to a very different culture from one's own. Moss is a perceptive and thoughtful observer and her account is a witty, vicarious delight.
November 27, 2021
A personal memoir of a year spent in Iceland, along with the author’s husband and their two young boys. As an adolescent, Moss was fascinated by the landscapes of Iceland - as an adult, she’s interested in the way Icelanders seem to construct a better society.
But do they? Moss adds a lot of nuance in her depiction of Icelandic society around 2008 (the year of the bank crisis and the recession). The housing is often very modern and lifeless, there is a lot of hidden poverty and a (difficult to grasp) hatred for second-hand items. Icelanders are car-crazed and the Icelandic sweater is not as old as we’re keen to believe.
And yet Moss� love for Iceland simmers through each page: the lava landscapes, the endless days in summer and endless nights in winter, eccentric inhabitants that believe in hidden people and are part of knitting groups. Definitely worth reading if you have visited Iceland before. One minor aspect: the author’s visit is mostly limited to Reykjavik and family outings with her children, so adventurers might have trouble connecting with his novel.
But do they? Moss adds a lot of nuance in her depiction of Icelandic society around 2008 (the year of the bank crisis and the recession). The housing is often very modern and lifeless, there is a lot of hidden poverty and a (difficult to grasp) hatred for second-hand items. Icelanders are car-crazed and the Icelandic sweater is not as old as we’re keen to believe.
And yet Moss� love for Iceland simmers through each page: the lava landscapes, the endless days in summer and endless nights in winter, eccentric inhabitants that believe in hidden people and are part of knitting groups. Definitely worth reading if you have visited Iceland before. One minor aspect: the author’s visit is mostly limited to Reykjavik and family outings with her children, so adventurers might have trouble connecting with his novel.
August 30, 2023
[I]t is typically Icelandic that a remote community of barely 1,000 people has an internationally renowned museum and a café where they grind coffee beans.This is one of a number of books that I have checked out from my current workplace since joining it a year and a couple of months ago, thereby doing my small part in increasing our circulation numbers (and sometimes protecting certain unworthy works from being effectively weeded). I can see why we acquired it (locals are the kind of hyper-rich with intellectual aspirations that require us to spend thousands of dollars a year on a hundred or so travel related subscriptions), as well as why it didn't prove popular (the author is far more of a thinker than an armchair venture capitalist). As I'm not made of money and am very good at the whole holistic understanding thing, I liked this far more than the average rating promised; indeed, I would read travel narratives a great deal more often if there were any credible promise of the average representative being a lot like this text. It has to do with the whole balance between self and other being a great deal more believably give and take than it typically is in English language media, as well as a focus on history/culture/art/ecology/contemporaneous politics/faces of the localized human rather than individual personalities that made the voyeuristic learning experience that less awkward and that much more genuinely engaging. Of course, most readers are not going to want to read about national bankruptcy, rape statistics, or vehicular atrocities ranging from mass road rage to rampant air pollution amidst their aurora borealis outings or visits to knitting cooperatives, and I do have to wonder at the lack of reliance on the Internet for figuring out some of the more pedestrian things (walking trails, for example, or second-hand markets). Still, I ended this work feeling that I had a good enough grasp on the country in terms of where it came from, where it wanted to go, and what it was willing to do to make the transition to maintain a comfortably evenhanded approach to it all. I still have my own idiotically idealistic thoughts about the sagas and Iceland's natural landscapes, but after having imbibed more than a few of the realities of poverty in a land of hard won connection, I'm more comfortable with my dreaming assumptions than I would've been in complete ignorance.
I buy things I know they don't particularly want, things made out of plastic which will still be on the planet long after the human species falls into deserved oblivion, and made by children as young as mine in countries that haven't ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.For the record, every state that is eligible to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has done so, save for the United States. Considering how child labor laws are being rolled back all over the country so that corporate stooges can avoid negotiating with unions like adults, one wonders what folks in Iceland would think about this particular land of the free, home of the brave.
When I tell a group of students about high-pitched sounds played to stop 'yobs' congregating outside English shops, they don't believe me. What kind of country would allow businesses to control children's freedom of movement.
September 13, 2019
Not quite the book I was expecting. The presence of a map implied more of a travelogue which this book isn't
However some sporadically interesting insights into the Icelandic mindset although rather more space given over to conversations about trolls/elves than I'd prefer.
However some sporadically interesting insights into the Icelandic mindset although rather more space given over to conversations about trolls/elves than I'd prefer.
October 2, 2019
I found his interesting. I always enjoy learning about cultural lifestyles and traditions i am not familiar with.
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