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    Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
    Unavailable
    Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
    Unavailable
    Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
    Ebook373 pages8 hours

    Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

    By Sarah Moss

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A memoir of a family’s year living in Reykjavik that “captures the fierce beauty of the Arctic landscape” (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.
     
    “Beautifully written . . . A stranger in a strange land, Moss grapples with new foods, customs and landscapes that are both oddly familiar and wildly alien in this absorbing memoir.” —Financial Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 1, 2013
    ISBN9781619022171
    Unavailable
    Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
    Author

    Sarah Moss

    Sarah Moss is the author of several novels and a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels are Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), Signs for Lost Children (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), The Tidal Zone (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and Ghost Wall, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2019. Sarah was born in Glasgow and grew up in the north of England. After moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik and West Cornwall, she now lives in the Midlands and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.

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    Reviews for Names for the Sea

    4/5

    79 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Came highly recommended by a friend who spent a year in Iceland as a book I ought to read before I go there for the first time. It's simply a wonderful book. Anecdotal, for sure, and I've no doubt that the author didn't have a totally generalizable experience, but it's a lovely read and gave me some very useful hints and tips to think about.
    • 4/5
      A really useful book for anyone planning to go to live in Iceland, in parts, but seriously mistaken in others, a consequence of living in an academic bubble. It is beautifully written throughout and makes a 'good read' even for someone without any actual interest in Iceland. The author comes across as very likeable, but typical of her own cosmopolitan tribe and glibly unaware of it, except in the sense that she is outsider in the place where she has gone to live. Ironically, then, most of the book is about stereotypes, both outsiders' stereotypes about Icelanders and Icelanders' own about themselves and about outsiders. In that sense, it's an interesting study, and one the author isn't always aware of making, but when it actually tries to get 'interesting', it isn't.; superficiality rules.The nadir of the book is the chapter on faeries, and the sections on landscape (volcanoes etc) read well, but follow the paths of the tourist brochures. There is very little sense of Reykjavik or engagement in its culture and almost no historical depth, but this is a memoir of the insulated academic middle classes, true to its type and utterly oblivious to its omissions.
    • 4/5
      An engaging narrative style and a candid sharing of the author's shortcomings make this an enjoyable introduction to living in Iceland as a foreigner (with a telling glance at the English middle class psyche). Having grown up as a foreigner abroad (in Europe), I occasionally wanted to shake Moss for her English reticence with language (and hence integration) and her failure to truly explore the island, but as a mature Englisher I had to admire her determination to seek out strangers to learn their stories. A fascinating counterpoint to the guidebooks, conscious of its flaws even if uncertain what those flaws may be. Not to be read as gospel.
    • 4/5
      'Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland' is Sarah Moss's memoir of the year which she spent in Iceland with her husband and two small children, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009. I read Sarah Moss's first novel 'Cold Earth' a little while ago and loved it, and with Iceland being very high on the list of places I have always wanted to to visit, this book was always going to appeal. The author sets out her love affair of northerly islands on the first page of the book. 'It's not the real, white Arctic, the scene of centuries of bearded latitude competitions, that sets me dreaming' she says 'but the grey archipelago of Atlantic stepping-stones. Scilly, Aran, Harris, Lewis, Orkney, Fair Isle, Shetland, Faroe. Iceland, Southern Greenland, the Canadian Maritimes; a sea-road linking ancient settlements, travelled for centuries.' Well, I can tick off the first five of those as visited (Orkney I've been to twice) as well as the Canadian Maritimes, while Shetland, Faroe and Iceland remain on the must see list, so I think somewhere or other I must have had a love of northerly islands bred into me as well! She sounds like a woman after my own heart in other ways as well: of the seven cardboard cartons which she packs up for her family's new life, three contain books and one is almost all food, Rekyavik's supermarkets being lacking in choice and hugely expensive. (Although I have to admit that I could live for a year without the preserved lemons, three kinds of paprika and dried lime leaves that find their way into her carton of food essentials.)Names for the Sea is very much a book of two halves. The first half, while Moss and her family were expecting to be living in Iceland for a period of at least several years, is a consideration of the cultural differences between Iceland and the UK (and the rest of Europe in general) experienced by Moss and her family, and in particular her reactions to them (which are more thoughtful than is frequently found in books of this type). And there are a lot of cultural differences, with food being particularly problematic. On the evidence of this book, Iceland does not seem to be a country that gives food a lot of thought at all. While in theory Moss wants to try as many as possible of Iceland's traditional dishes in practice, delicacies such as charred sheep's heads fail to win her over in practice:'If you look into the meat section of an Icelandic supermarket, burnt sheep's heads will look back at you, milky eyeballs projecting out of brown skulls. Apparently they come cut in half, so you don't have to saw through the skull at home. Max wants us to buy one. I am pretending I don't think Tobias has eaten sheep's brains at nursery. Icelanders regard this as an easy week night supper and my students are amused by my horror. You eat lambs' legs, they say, why not the head? They are right - I can see that it's moral as well as logical to eat the whole once you've killed it - but I'm still not going to touch one, much less take it home and scoop its brains out'By the second half of the book, Moss and her husband have come to the conclusion that financially Iceland is not viable for them as a long term home, and the tone of the book changes, becoming less of a personal response to adapting to a new culture and more of a travelogue. This certainly contains some interesting parts, but for me loses the personal nature of the first half of the book. 
    • 4/5
      Travel memoir, perfectly well written but describing a somewhat odd society in Iceland, making it seem rather unattractive - though it is a wonderful country in my experience, well worth a visit.
    • 3/5
      There's a lot of parallels to our own move to Iceland but it's different enough that I learned a bunch and felt taken for a ride, not spied upon.
    • 4/5
      whoo! last one of the year & hitting the target :)
      Interesting anecdote about a teachers year in Iceland, and the alienation of being a foreigner, recognising the apathy that sets in so you go no further than the known routes...
    • 4/5
      Iceland is one of the youngest islands on the planet, given that it is being created as I write. It is also a land that has few trees, stark landscapes and is populated by a close knit community.

      Mos fell in love with the country on a holiday and decides to take the plug and move there to take a position at the university for a year. As she finds her feet, she discovers that the people are as unique as the landscape around. It is tough to settle in at first, as very few properties are available to rent. As her and the family find their feet they start to settle in.

      Through her contacts at the university, she starts to meet the people and the characters of the country. She meets a lady who claims to see the hidden people, the elves and trolls from the sagas. The people knit constantly, and she tries to take it up, but ends up crocheting.

      She is there at the time of the credit crunch, where there is violence on the streets for the first time ever, and when the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupts. The Icelanders take it all in their stride.

      It is a beautifully written book. Moss manages to get across the intensity of the country, and some of the frustrations with the language and the way that they do things. Unlike most travel books that are transitory, she is living there are is part of the community; her respect for the country and love of the natural phenomena such as the aurora, comes across really powerfully in the book.