Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World [Hardcover]

Charles Fergus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1998

Little Lava is a farm on the west coast of Iceland. No roads lead to it; the way lies across a lagoon flooded twice a day by the tide. A lava field borders the farm. From the house, views give onto mountains, volcanoes, rugged coast, and the pure Icelandic sky.

In Summer at Little Lava, Charles Fergus tells how he fixed up an abandoned house on the farm and spent a summer there with his wife and their young son-living day to day in great simplicity, without heat, electricity, running water, or other conveniences. Inspired by Henry Beston's classic book, The Outermost House-about a year Beston spent living in a cottage on Cape Cod-Fergus sought a place at the outer limits of civilization, and on the coast of Iceland he found it.

As it happened, there was a sudden death in his family-the cruel, pointless murder of his mother at her home in Pennsylvania; and so, in the twilit open spaces of Iceland, Fergus confronted his grief, in the midst of the country's abundant wildlife and distinctive geology, its history and mythology. The little house on the coast became a refuge as he sought to recover himself and the meaning of his life. "Little Lava was a place where I could pass the days in peace," he tells us, "where I could take the first steps into a future that, I hoped, would not be so dimmed with grief and pain."

Summer at Little Lava is a wise and vigilant book. It touches on Iceland and Icelanders, birds and nature, tragedy and personal loss; in strong, resonant prose, it evokes the strange and compelling landscape of Iceland.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Emulating The Outermost House, Henry Beston's classic narrative of a year in a Cape Cod beach house, Summer at Little Lava is a memoir of a man in retreat, seeking to delineate both his inner thoughts and the natural world around him. But instead of the Cape, Charles Fergus goes with his wife and son to the strange and wonderful country of Iceland. Here they spend the summer repairing and inhabiting Litla Hraun, or "Little Lava," a tiny house by the sea. "It seemed to me," Fergus writes, "that, at the end of the twentieth century, one needed to migrate farther from the known world, closer to the earth's conceptual rim, to find a truly fugitive setting. Iceland, to my mind, was itself an outermost house of the Western world."

In this "fugitive setting," the author grieves his mother, murdered in a robbery in Pennsylvania only a few months before his departure. This memoir, however, ultimately covers more physical than emotional terrain, as ardent naturalist Fergus takes Iceland itself, a rugged country of volcanoes and fewer than 300,000 people, as his principal subject. It is home to striking landscapes and unusual fauna: lava cones and marshlands, heaths and black-sand beaches, sea eagles and foxes and orca whales. Fergus is a careful observer; he researches and notes Icelandic history and literature, and, with the help of his wife, fluent in the language, meets and learns from its unusual inhabitants--people who live, they say, "with one foot on the land and the other in the sea." --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly

Seeking a refuge to heal his grief over the death of his mother, who was stabbed by a burglar in her Pennsylvania home, Fergus took his wife, Nancy, and their eight-year-old son, Will, to unlikely Iceland for three months in the summer of 1996. The respite did its work. Living in a friend's abandoned, isolated concrete house called Little Lava, the family spent its days hiking; Fergus (Swamp Screamer) also fished and kayaked. He writes lyrically about the natural world the family encountered, birds, in particular eagles, volcanic mountains, marshes. The emptiness of the landscape reflected Fergus's own emptiness, yet Little Lava, bound by marsh, mountains and sea, proved hospitable. He fills his book with Icelandic folklore and tells us about the country's history and simple economy in which people depend on farming and fishing for their livelihood. In that summer's perpetual light, tragedy again visited the family, however, when a young niece was killed in the explosion of a TWA aircraft off the coast of New York. But most vivid here is the natural world, written about with such vibrancy readers will yearn to visit this land at the edge of nowhere. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 289 pages
• Publisher: North Point Pr; 1st edition (August 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525528
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525521
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #498,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Scandinavian
  • #24 in Books > History > Europe > Iceland

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice balance of nature, travel, and journal writing., February 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World (Hardcover)

My kind of book is a non-fiction book entitled "A Year in (blank)" or any calendar subset of that (e.g., Sue Hubbell's A Country Year). So when I encountered Summer at Little Lava, I was interested. I knew that it wasn't the journal of the author's life for a year in the country. But a summer in a remote cottage on the coast of Iceland was close enough for me. I was not disappointed. I tended to skim over the detail of natural history and bird behavior, but slowed down considerably when Fergus described crossing the lava fields, ocean kayaking, or having coffee with their distant Icelandic neighbors. The mix of natural history, animal and plant description, and story telling was well balanced. There was enough "journal-like" story telling to keep me reading to the end. The chapter "Poison Cold" was so good it was worth re-reading, but be warned -- be close to a woodstove when you read it because it will make you cold. An added human dimension to the book is the occasional memories and thoughts of the author as he wrestles with the deaths of both his mother and his niece. A particularly touching passage recounts the telling to his son of the tragic death of his niece. I recommend this book for all travel and nature readers. And for readers looking for a book without a hidden agenda and unnecessary symbolism. The author simply writes about what he sees and feels . . . and sometimes what he deeply feels.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Of great interest becouse of my lineage, July 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World (Hardcover)

I am third generation Icelandic, all of my grandparents immegrated to america in the late 19th century. They were all: "west coast Icelanders" Reading Fergus's book was of especial interest because my maternal grandmother [Holmfrethur Hansdottir] was born on Oct 20, 1860 at: Litliahrauni, Iceland, the exact site of Little Lava in this book. I have a journal writen by her husband in 1930 that spells out this history. I would like to send a copy of this journal to Mr. Fergus if I can get his address. Thank you.

7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A sad book unintentionally almost funny, October 24, 2002

By 

Jose Hanson (Edina, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World (Paperback)

You won't find much here about Iceland, but if you're looking for a case study on the American male midlife-crisis, this may be your baby. Taken that way it's unintentionally, although darkly, funny (There's no intentional humor at all. None.) And despite the jacket blurb, don't look for wisdom. A Pennsylvania guy in his 40's with house, wife, toddler and dog is drawn to spending a summer in rural Iceland. His mother worries about how her toddler grandson will handle it, and the author can't come up with any reason to go there, but then his mom is brutally murdered. This provides a good reason. Now the son needs Iceland to cure his grief and rage and also maybe to get in some kayaking on the side. He's no longer able to have sex with his wife, but finds he's generally able to sleep after pulling his pud. So in December he heads to Iceland by himself -- probably not the best time to fix up an abandoned shack near the Arctic Circle, but then he leans heavily on goodhearted Icelanders to pull him through. ("Friends" in the book are horribly used.) The wife and kid arrive in June. Nothing much is going on at the ends of the earth, and this would be a good chance for contemplation and to bring a deep truth or two out of the wilderness. Instead, the reader gets an almost day-by-day action account of what must be one of the most tedious, dreary summers ever. If anything worth mentioning happens, I missed it. The toddler apparently had to be rescued from a manure heap, but the author skirts that. And he finds dead things everywhere: a seal washed up on the beach doesn't smell or look great; baby wagtails fall out of the nest and are eaten. After a month of this everybody gets to go home to PA for a couple of weeks (for a funeral) and then returns to finish out August in Iceland. The guy never tries to learn Icelandic and argues it can't be learned, although his wife learns enough to get by. An Icelander sends love poetry to the wife, but the author breaks that up. He'd like to stay longer, but hears PA calling. You close the book hoping the wife and kid will run away with the poet.