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

wouldn’t have come to live and raise her children here if things hadn’t changed. Anyway, says Charlotte, there’s a book I found very comforting when we first came to live here, and I wanted to lend it to you. Reading it was a big thing for me when I first arrived; it made me feel that someone had been through it all before. She presses a worn paperback into my hands and goes off to run her business for a few hours before taking her daughters swimming.

Ripples from Iceland, by Amalia Lindal, was first published in 1962. Lindal was an American who came to live in Reykjavík with her Icelandic husband when they were ready to have children in the 1950s, and wrote about her painful assimilation. It is partly the story of the narrator’s own erosion, where the damage of motherhood overlaps with the emigrant’s loss of identity. As in so many travel books, writing seems to be therapy for the trauma of alienation. It’s a trauma that takes familiar, domestic form for Lindal:

I think one of the most difficult things for newcomers to Iceland to adjust to is the food. Such items as bacon, ham, pork, veal and beef immediately disappeared from our menu when we arrived because of the high prices . . . Icelandic lamb is our staple meat: fresh, ground, salted, smoked, or in sausages or frankfurters, and mixed with spice and potato flour in a meat paste which can be fried up into stiff meatballs.

A recent United Nations report listed Iceland as having the highest protein and calorie consumption of western Europe and the United States. The conclusion was drawn therefore that Icelanders eat very well. I agree that the protein intake is high, with all the fish, meat, skyr, dried peas and eggs used in baking . . . The carbohydrate consumption is also high, with potatoes, bread and cakes daily, and much use of sago, cornstarch and potato flour for thickening. Icelanders are well filled, but not well nourished, unless they take vitamins and cod-liver oil, or are wealthy enough to afford imported fruits and expensive fresh or canned vegetables daily.

Lindal writes a lot about vegetables. She dreams of American supermarkets and wakes up as she pays for trolleys full of peaches. Get over it, I find myself unfairly thinking, able to identify someone else’s whingeing where my own complaints are obviously those of a normal person presented with weirdness. Go watch the light on Esja and remember why you came, but of course that’s not why she came. She came for love, which is less reliable than mountains.

It’s not just the vegetables that annoy Lindal. Coming from an American Protestant background, she has no patience for the Icelandic attitude to money:

In the fishing industry, one may make 100,000 krónur in a season whereas another, not so lucky, makes only 10,000. It’s always a gamble, and so the fishermen and the merchants engaged in exporting and importing think in terms of big money and the big chance and have no feeling for a relatively stable and dependable income. The farmers, on the other hand, have an attitude about money much closer to that of large industry, but modern Iceland’s economy is based on the elusive herring rather than farming.

This is clearly what is known in our house as a Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, a kind of key to all mythologies that finds one explanation for a complicated and ongoing process, but the idea is appealing. The banks fell because Icelanders have fishermen’s attitude to risk. Big money and big chances. It’s not true – many of the people who have lost houses and cars claim to have had no idea of the risks the banks were taking, and in any case Icelandic fishing is going rather well because the boats are landing their catches in Norway and Scotland and selling their fish for pounds and Norwegian kroner – but there’s a storyteller’s logic that works. The bankers are known in Iceland – even by the majority who disapprove of their actions – as ‘Viking Raiders’, stripping assets from útlönd. Vikings, fishermen, men who treat money like fish.

The winter weekdays are full, and mostly happy. I work, Max goes to school, Tobias goes to nursery and Anthony bakes a lot of bread – but then there are weekends. Icelanders, we gather, spend winter weekends visiting their extended families. With nearly eighty per cent of Icelanders living in the Greater Reykjavík area, almost everyone has parents, grandparents, cousins and a proliferation of step-children, ex-partners and in-laws within a few minutes’ drive. (It’s one of the reasons Icelandic marriages don’t last, a sociologist at work tells me. With such dense social and familial networks, there is no chance of keeping an affair secret. He might have been joking.) Grandparents, we learn, often take the children at weekends; we suspect this may be one of the reasons why Icelandic couples are so relaxed about parenthood. My students tell me that in most families, one household, usually the grandparents’, will hold a weekly open house on Sunday afternoons, with coffee and a table of cakes and the expectation that everyone will attend or send a convincing reason for absence. It sounds comforting, I say, envying the idea of a nuclear family buoyed on a sea of other people’s interest and concern, because it feels as if Anthony and I must paddle hard to keep ours afloat until Monday morning. Sometimes, Pétur and Messíana let us pretend to be theirs, and Anthony and I can sip coffee and talk to their real children while Messíana reads to Tobias and her two-year-old granddaughter and Max plays with their nine-year-old grandson, jumping from behind a wall into the wind coming off the sea into the garden and then taking shelter again behind the house. But most weekends, Icelanders live their Icelandic lives and we roll up our sleeves, trying not to count down the hours until