Thursday, January 31, 2008

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

I've been flying a little bit more than usual lately and on my way out the door on my way to Florida, I grabbed Vendela Vida's newest book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I've delayed writing about it because I thought I would be able to find a perfect way to describe it, but I keep landing on the word "crystalline." I don't mean it so much in that I feel this book is transparant. It's sharp and jagged and beautiful. Maybe that is the only way I can describe it. Being set mostly north of the Arctic Circle, the landscape lends itself to such terms, as snow does; we all become nostalgic and innocent when the snow is deep. Combine that with a sharp, focused prose and we receive an elegiac tightly-woven novel that is so linked to the landscape that it couldn't be any other way.

Like the main character (and I suspect us all), I feel it's hard to go home. The precious difference between Clarissa Iverton's trip north and my own trip south is that when I land, while it will always be a little bit strange and disconnected, it will always be warm.

I've been curious about Vida's work since I started reading The Believer. I'd glad I started here. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is an addictive and necessary novel, one of those rare works that tells us what we already know in a completely new language.

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