Customer Reviews

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Vendela Vida's second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, tells the haunting story of Clarissa Iverton's discovery that her recently-deceased father was not the man whose name appears on her birth certificate, and her subsequent search for her biological father in Lapland. It is here that she becomes acquainted with indigenous people known as the Sami, and comes to term with the past of her mother, who abandons her when she is fourteen. When Clarissa plans to meet her mother at the store and is fifteen minutes late, she is informed by the woman at the counter that her mother has left because she "got tired of waiting." Vida's prose is simple and matter-of-fact as her narrator grapples with issues of identity, writing that "When you believe anyone could be your mother, you begin to believe anyone could be your brother, your lover, your son." Her distanced perspective captures perfectly the sense of loss and anger plaguing the narrator, and her detachment not only to her home but also to the people around her. She writes, "Disappearing is nothing. I learned this from my mother," a line which not only echoes her willingness to take this journey without so much as notifying anyone of where she will be, but also reflects the narrator's eventual coming to terms with her mother's disappearance. Sprinkled throughout this novel are also vivid descriptions ("Outside my window, dusk was already settling in like a bruise") and dry wit to offset the darker moments. Toward the beginning of the novel when Clarissa is in New York and in a fight with her fiancée, she blocks her bedroom door with her hamper and when he asks her about it, she responds, "To hamper you." What is perhaps most remarkable about this novel is Vida's ability to fully immerse her readers in the mystical world of Lapland as she shows us everything from reindeer herding to a hotel made entirely of ice. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is a moving page-turner that I enthusiastically recommend.

I read an excellent review of Vendela Vida's latest novel in People Magazine and decided straight away to give it try. I was not disappointed. I fairly blitzed through this book - others here mention going cover-to-cover in one sitting. It took me two, but it's the type of work that encourages you to read 'just one more chapter' before putting the book down. And, in fact, you never do put it down. Though only 226 clean (almost spartan, in fact) pages, you won't feel cheated. Vida makes every single word count. You never have to amble through overstuffed, toss-away passages.

In the process, I learned quite a bit about Lapland and its people. Vida did some excellent first-hand info-gathering there. Her legwork really manifests itself in a knowledgeable fashion. The map - courtesy of Paul J. Pugliese - provides clarity and is a touchstone for readers throughout the text. I highly recommend this book.

Last night I began this book at 8:00 p.m. and didn't put it down until I had read the last word. The writing is eloquent and the story is deeply compelling. I thought about the book all day today, and the questions it raises about the connection of the past to the present and about identity. I highly recommend this book.

Thanks to this book, I didn't leave my house all day one Saturday.

"Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" is simply an incredibly well-told, well-conceived story.

The story Ms. Vida has created - of a 29-year-old woman's unexpected journey to north Finland and into her own past - is so quirky and original in its setting and twists, yet completely believable in its main character's superhuman attempt to connect with her matronage and sense of humanity.

This is an artful, powerfully imagined book.

Cheers to Ms. Vida for reminding us of how good a novel can be.

Vendela Vida has a way with words, a veritable gift, and she bestows this sometimes snappily ironic, sometimes woe-is-me sardonic, gift upon Clarissa Iverton, the young narrator of Vida's beautifully written--but oh so consciously written--novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. The book is spare, deliberate, cold. Clarissa is supposed to be (I think) impulsive, lost, and not-to-be-blamed-for-being cold. As the story unfolds there are hints that Clarissa might be able to achieve some balance between unwavering froideur and emotional dynamism. And as the story opens, and Clarissa feeds us her back-story, the odd and unexamined behavior of family and friends keeps us just enough off-balance that it's easy to read just for plot. We can accept Clarissa's genetically endowed, inalienable right to constitutional coldness because, on that point, the plot is persuasive--an egoistically sadistic, abandoning mom; an overly attentive boyfriend who has consistently lied to Clarissa about her true origins; a dad who dies without revealing that he's not her biological dad. Betrayed by every person she ought to be able to trust, Clarissa makes a credible victim. Plot-wise, that is. We automatically hand her our sympathy; it shouldn't take very much to keep it.

But accepting the character's status as entitled victim is not the same thing as feeling transported by a tale that examines human suffering, human hatred--there are some terrible people here--and human carelessness. This novel settles for the depiction of Clarissa's cramped consciousness, suggesting that the cramping is the result of other people's lies and failures; it does not aim to carry us beyond the trap. A gut-level curiosity compels Clarissa to find her biological father, but the struggle over whether or not to forgive anyone-- her dead step dad, her misguided boyfriend, even herself--never even arises in the morally closed landscape of Vida's tale. With slightly more editorial care, Vida could have nailed an unreliable narration--she could have made Clarissa an obviously self-serving fabulist--but, as it stands now, the young woman seems sardonic and vain, modestly smug and pleased over her fine prose, but never emotionally dynamic, troubling, or vulnerable enough to demand the reader's ongoing engagement. Geography is what makes her story pop open. If Clarissa hadn't gone someplace as intriguing as Lapland, I never would have followed.

By hermetically sealing Clarissa's story inside her single consciousness, much of the potentially fabulous material provided by that trip to Finnish Lapland remains unrealized, unexamined. A sizeable polyglot population appears within the pages of this very short novel--and there's lots of travel--but because Clarissa never ventures outside her own self-centered head, we're stuck inside it too. The Other lies forever outside our mutual range. I'm fully aware that this may be exactly the plight that Vida is trying to convey through her tale--that a trauma at the source of a person's origins may prove to be so damaging that such a person might never regain sufficient trust to crawl out of her own brain again. She may become unattractive, vain, self-centered, and boring no matter what happens in her life. And, yes, when she does sit down to tell her story, maybe all she can spin is a perfectly modulated, prettified tale with a soupcon of hipster-ish ennui thrown in. Maybe that's credible, but Vendela Vida's obvious talent could accomplish much greater things. A wonderfully written, ultimately disappointing venture.

This intriguing novel features largely unsympathetic characters, a bleak, cold environment, and spare, brisk storytelling. The plot is set in motion by a biological identity crisis, as Clarissa, the protagonist, sets off from New York on a journey to unearth her roots north of the Arctic Circle. Later, the novel reveals her earlier experience with sexual violence, as well as her mother's. The novel's two main themes are intertwined. The first is the inherent challenge in severing one's circumstances from one's identity. It raises the question: does what happens to us necessarily define us? The second, related theme of escaping the past and reinventing the self is revealed at the novel's very end as the main character makes a drastic life change. The novel is told in first-person, with a strained emotional urgency that seems part cry for help, part outburst of rage. I read the book in one sitting. The novel is compelling for its brutal tone and theme, its depiction of the Sami people of Lapland, and its sad, strong heroine Clarissa, who is both abandoned by, and abandons, love.

Many readers have admired Vendela's spare prose. Unlike most other readers, I was at first put off by what seemed to me like the hard, awkward prose of a non-native speaker. Nonetheless, I was quickly drawn into what I ultimately found to be a compelling and even haunting novel. I did not like the main character who I found to be at times gratuitously cruel. I did not like many of the characters. However, Vendela draws you into a world of difficult, hard events in which her characters make hard, surprising choices that achieve for them a kind of redemption and which made me question the easy, accepted choices we make in our lives. I only gave this book a 4 instead of a 5 because ultimately I was not won over by Vendela's prose although the story and even the characters were for me compelling. I could not put the book down once started and I know I will never forget it.

I picked up this book because of my interest in the Sami, and the Sami characters in the book, especially Anna Kristine and Henrik are by far the most appealing, compelling, and sympathetic. In Anna Kristine, Clarissa finds someone who could give her the affection and care that she missed from her mother. But Clarissa turns away from that love and from everyone else in her life. I wanted more of the Sami and less of Clarissa's self-centered behavior. The book reads quickly, I read it in one sitting, but the prose is so spare, it feels contrived. The book is compelling, but not satisfying.

Life is never clear and choices don't make sense- unless you're in a book where the author lets you stumble into thoughts and feelings that end up making sense when you don't want them to. A heart-wrenching story of the avoidance of being a victim and acceptance of violence - it has left me trying to find another ending. Very thought provoking. I started the book and couldn't put it down until I finished it. I have to ditto -'liked it against my will' review. Highly recommend.

I agree that the writing is lovely, the book certainly tells you a lot about Finland and the Sami. But I came away feeling that I didn't believe in the psychology of the story: I kept reading because I hoped we were going somewhere with Clarisa but in the end, there was nothing - except a very difficult to believe tacked on happy-ish ending. I felt as if I had watched the author move characters around like a child with dolls in a very pretty setting. I found I didn't believe in her characters, in their emotions, their responses.