A land of boiling mud, erupting volcanoes, lunar-like landscapes and astonishing modern architecture, where people believe in elves, fear outsiders and drive SUVs like maniacs. It’s all found in Iceland, where British academic Sarah Moss takes her family to live for a year when she takes a teaching position.
In Names for the Sea, Moss conveys both the routine and profound qualities of life in Iceland as a stranger, an outsider, as natives refer to Moss and others “from away,” those from útlönd, the outlands.
“I cannot remember the beginning of my longing for northerly islands,” she writes, recalling her grandfather’s adventure on an Iceland-bound fishing trawler.
“It’s not the real, white Arctic”¦ that sets me dreaming, but the grey archipelago of Atlantic stepping stones,” she writes. “Aran”¦Orkney, Shetland. Iceland, southern Greenland, the Canadian Maritimes; a sea-road linking ancient settlements, traveled for centuries.”
Before the financial crisis (the kreppa) that began in 2008, plenty of Icelanders lived high on the hog, Moss learns, with rampant overconsumption (everyone had to redo their kitchens). Sprawling suburban housing developments spread like wildfire, only to become eerie ghost ‘burbs now, she says.
Moss has a refreshing perspective on this semi-exotic, favored destination: “I recognize my own distrust of Icelandic tourism, of the collector’s desire to tick off geysers and volcanoes and midnight sun on some kind of Lonely Planet checklist, toting up experiences like any other commodity,” she writes.
Moss witnesses a volcanic eruption firsthand. In 2010, Eyjafjallajökull shuts down flights from Europe for several weeks. She and her son go on a bus that offers “volcano trips.”
“It’s still being called a ‘tourist eruption,'” she writes, “as if Icelanders themselves are so used to molten lava bursting over the horizon that they don’t bother to glance up, and it’s only foreigners who feel the need to go and watch.”
The Westman Islands, population 5,000, had a major eruption in 1973.
“The volcano on Haeimaey which had been sleeping for around 5,000 years woke up,” Moss writes when she visits in 2009. In this cataclysm, 400 houses were destroyed, another 300 filled with two million tons of ash and seven million tons of lava covered the main town.
Names for the Sea offers a perfect combination of eloquence and lack of pretense, as the author relates daily life as a mother and a teacher—finding housing, day care drop-offs, buying food and dealing with weather, while writing about Icelanders she befriends, who teach her about their country’s customs, history and quirks.
School children, to the author’s surprise (she has two of her own in schools there) take unusual responsibility for their safety and time after school. There’s no worry about security in ReykjavÃk schools by parents. “The streets of suburbia belong to the children, who make perfectly sensible citizens,” she writes.
Icelandic driving is not for the faint of heart, Moss discovers. “SUVs weave across the lanes, cars drive bumper to bumper at 80 miles per hour,” she writes.
Moss likes to explore what makes Icelanders tick. “I wonder if I am beginning to understand why Icelanders seem so unperturbed by economic collapse, the swine flu epidemic [in Europe] and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull,” she writes.
“Fishing,” as a key industry and bones of Icelandic culture, “means that all plans and livelihoods are always dependent on the whims of the North Atlantic wind and weather, and the alternative is farming on land that explodes from time to time,” Moss writes.
The author observes that “a limited sense of both responsibility and agency” may be the only way of remaining sane there. “You can’t live in Iceland without discovering the limits of human power,” Moss writes.
Finding those limits through her experiences and observations makes for a satisfying read.
Linda Hedman Beyus is a Connecticut-based writer and editor.