Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

and come out by what I remember as another building site, the new campus for the University of Reykjavík. Háskólinn í Reykjavík is a private institution, specialising in Business and Computer Studies, and for all of the time we lived in Iceland there were rumours (at least in Háskóli Íslands) that Háskólinn í Reykjavík was on the point of bankruptcy, had been born of the economic boom and was dying in the collapse. The new buildings, it was said, would push it over the edge. But apparently not. Háskólinn í Reykjavík, Matthew reminds me, recruits internationally by offering salaries two or three times those paid by the national university, but also keeps academics on short-term contracts and offers none of the benefits of public sector employment (in Iceland, these include highly subsidised holidays in summer houses owned by the union, free adult education classes in anything from knitting to advanced software design, and meal tickets for use in the university café). Most staff at Háskóli Íslands see its competitor’s approach to human resources as distasteful, un-Icelandic or perhaps un-Nordic, driven by commerce rather than intellectual value. I see the point, and Háskólinn í Reykjavík has no interest in the unprofitable Humanities anyway, but for a building like this I could probably bring myself to prostitute my talent. It’s Sunday afternoon and even HR is closed, but we peer through the windows to see a circular atrium brimming with diluted sunlight, although it’s still drizzling outside and the sea gleams no more than creased leather. Stairs lead off this atrium like the warp of a spider’s web. All the external walls are glass. We go round to the café on the shore, which I also saw taking shape week by week. It was finished before we left, a granite and glass cube where people richer and less anxious than I was sat sipping coffee and chatting over new laptops. I used to feel like a stray cat looking through a fishmonger’s window. We can go in, says Matthew, so we do. Hot chocolates all round. It looks too smart for children, full of couples of a certain age with well-arranged hair, dressed in shades of beige and black. The couples have cream-smeared plates and foamy coffee cups, the end of a Sunday treat. Nonsense, says Matthew, this is Iceland, children rule, and then the waitress brings over pencils and colouring blocks with our drinks, and they do fine. I like it here. There is a single gerbera in a white vase on each black table, and the white walls reflect the sea’s glimmer. If we lived here, I too would come with my laptop. We treat Matthew, being at last in a position to return favours, and leave with another ghost laid.

And so to Harpa. Matthew drives into an underground car park lit like a 1980s disco. Coloured lights splatter the walls with pink and green and red, and the zebra crossings are beamed from the ceiling onto the asphalt. We make our way to sliding glass doors with the hall’s emblem etched across them, over a black stone floor that shines like still water and up broad escalators that remind me of the Moscow underground. We ascend, and come out into a space taller than St Pancras, taller than the British Library, whose floor stretches from our feet like a frozen lake. One wall is the matt black of old lava, the other those fish-scales, which turn out to be hundreds of prisms, each the size of a person, stacked up the height of many generations. Pale concrete stairs snake up to the sky, and the stairs are lined with concrete terraces where there are black sofas and purple stools. We go up, Tobias running ahead, Max daunted by the space, to the very top, where there’s a bar and more seats and you can see out across the docks to Esja. In the atrium far below, children run and call. At Harpa’s feet, the ground is scarred and steel rods grow out of puddles and churned mud. That, says Matthew, was meant to be another underground car park, over which there would be a plaza with trees and benches and an infinity pool. I guess it’s just going to sit there like that, an eyesore, for the foreseeable future. We turn back and look down into Harpa’s depths.

So, says Matthew, what do you think?

I think it’s spectacular, I say. I think it’s very Icelandic, an outrageously ambitious project that hasn’t been compromised in the execution. No-one’s tried to cut corners or scale things down. Wherever the money comes from, Icelanders are good at spending it.

We begin to stroll down the upper slopes. There are groups of friends chatting on the sofas, a few solitary adults lounging in the floor-level prisms with books or notebooks or laptops, families congregated around the tables. People are using it like an indoor park, like a real public amenity. In the middle are the concert halls, of all sizes, and some meeting rooms. It will never pay its way, says Matthew, it’s mostly for classical music and the audiences just aren’t there on this scale. I might feel differently if these were my taxes, I admit, before remembering that, one way or another, between Icesave and my Icelandic contributions, some twinkle of Harpa’s scales does come from my purse. I can’t imagine any part of the British public sector ever building anything like this. Maybe it is always easier to love the place that isn’t home.

Pétur has lent us his summer house. It’s in Stykkishólmur, a village on the northern side of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, behind a chain of mountains that’s occasionally visible from Reykjavík on a clear day. We drive the familiar route to Borgarnes, and then branch off from Route 1’s circuit, over the hills and down the other side. This area, Pétur says, was one of the first to be settled when the Vikings arrived in Iceland. There are