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

on the concrete but confident and independent in their own estimation of their limits. The students turn up well-prepared and open-minded. Nobody abducts six-year-olds making their own way to school. Playgrounds are not vandalised, teenage girls are not wolf-whistled, no-one fears mugging or car theft. Babies sleep in prams on the pavement while their parents try on clothes or sit over coffee with friends. I hear myself sounding much more right-wing than usual and remind myself that Iceland, even if it is not the classless society claimed by many Icelanders, has a far smaller gap between the rich and the poor than Britain, that low crime rates are usually associated with socio-economic equality, that there are complex reasons and a unique history behind Icelanders’ differences from the rest of Europe. There is, I hypothesise, six weeks in, something more like social equality, more trust, and better behaviour, at least until people find themselves behind a wheel or running a bank.

By the end of September, the sunsets that have been inching back a few minutes every day have reached Max’s bedtime, and most days it’s not ‘sunset’ but a more familiar darkening of grey skies. It rains as much as at home. We’re all wearing winter coats and I am beginning to be glad that school and nursery insisted that the children have proper Arctic winter clothing from the beginning of term. If you wait, Katrin told us, all the snowsuits will be sold, and don’t expect the shops to import any more. Toddlers’ winter clothing is seasonal and imported from Denmark, and no-one’s going to risk importing anything they can’t sell.

I’m still taking my evening walks along the shore, even on days when the rain on my glasses refracts the low-level lighting along the coast path so that the city lights across the water are jumbled and kaleidoscopic. Almost all the birds are gone now, and I rarely encounter another person. Icelanders, says Matthew, take to the gym in winter. Another colleague tells me that she and her husband bought good waterproof coats only when the kreppa forced them to sell their second car. As far as I can see, most people don’t go outside at all in rain or wind. I understand why people prefer to be inside on a wet night, but I want to follow the year’s cycle out here on the shore, feel the rain and wind as well as turning my face to the sun at midnight and standing shivering under the aurora. Even in the dark, the half-finished buildings stand black against the horizon, like shells of bombed churches.

5

Pétur’s Saga

The first snow comes in early October. It doesn’t exactly fall, because it’s coming horizontally, borne on a wind so strong that I have to hold on to Max as we walk 300 metres down the street to school. Tobias, it seems, can’t go out, since the wind would flatten him and neither of us can hold the pushchair against its force. Dodging down the sides of buildings, Anthony carries him to the bus stop to get to nursery, but we’re beginning to see Icelandic car-dependency with more sympathy. We can’t manage without one.

I wonder how people coped here before cars. The ‘ring road’, Route 1, which makes a circuit of the island, was finished only in 1974, and even when Kathy and I first came in 1994 there were people living in the countryside without cars, dependent on the daily bus (which has now been replaced by a summer-only tourist coach service at four times the price). I’ve been reading, with horror and fascination, an autobiographical novel that I found in the university library about life in the north of Iceland in the 1940s, just before wartime and post-war prosperity made Icelanders drift from the farms into sedentary, urban lives defined by earning and spending. Valgarður Egilsson’s Waiting for the South Wind was published in 2001, although its nostalgia for the wartime years seems to speak from the last century. The book’s relentless romanticism makes me want to move to Tokyo or New York and buy shares in oil companies, but it also suggests how much Iceland has changed:

For generations these people had lived at the Stonechurch farm, strong men, peaceful Vikings, who instinctively knew how to carry out any kind of work, whether it was building a house or a boat, shoeing a horse, building a bridge or a church or a ship – or even dealing with polar bears.

While the ‘strong men’ are indulging their instincts in matters of bridge-building and polar bears, Mother cooks, cleans and washes for her husband and seven sons while singing opera over the mops and pans. The family live on blood porridge and skyr and thrive because ‘in cold weather, all food tastes good out in the open air. It is only at twenty-seven degrees Celsius that people become connoisseurs or gourmets with regard to food. Here the temperature was seven to eight degrees Celsius.’ Iceland, it should be noticed, does not reach twenty-seven degrees Celsius. Gourmets are foreign. The Stonechurch boys soon learn to ignore the cold as they go about the spring work of breaking ice with their bare hands so that sheep don’t fall through it and yomping along the cliffs in a blizzard. The Fjorders are real men and real Icelanders:

No authorities had ever visited the Fjords, the landscape protected the Fjorders from them, it was too steep, considering outsiders were not surefooted. The Fjorders, on the other hand, obeyed only God and the song of the golden plover, as well as fate and earthly forces.

On their way across the Fjord Heath – treading paths between rocks and tussocks that were only two horse hooves wide – the Fjorders had to keep their ankle movements and reflexes in order, their muscles were striated and not atrophic, their blood was still red and streaming, their minds – and their brains – were unspoiled by money or any other