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

experience in the staff-room at Menntaskóli, most people couldn’t see his point, and one of his colleagues said the idea of taking things from the dump disgusted her. When she’d bought a new sideboard, she’d smashed up the old one before throwing it out. Why? Mark asked. Because I wanted it gone, obviously, she said. I don’t want someone else using it when I’ve decided it’s trash.

Mark and I marvel at his story, both of us having grown up with furniture from auctions and junk shops, pulled out of skips or passed on by elderly relatives, and continued these methods in independence, both of us liking the past lives of the things we live with. The Icelandic horror at the idea of the second-hand seems to be partly to do with the impossibility of anonymity here, the fear of ‘strangers’. The risk is one of disclosure, that the person who classified the object as ‘trash’ might see the same object reclassified by someone else, though it seems that it would be the new owner who should feel ashamed. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is why second-hand clothes are so terrible, because the anonymity of charitable giving might be broken, you might recognise your child’s outgrown coat on someone else and thus have to acknowledge some kind of hierarchy. One of the most widely held beliefs among Icelanders is that there is no hierarchy here. I remember Gunnar Karlsson, one of the first people to whom Pétur referred me when I started asking about the old days. Gunnar is a historian in his seventies who grew up on a remote farm and went on to take his PhD at University College London in the 1960s. In his view the Icelandic conviction of absolute social equality was partly responsible for the crisis. ‘In Iceland, everyone compares him or herself with everyone else. No-one thinks, I am a common person and this car or this telephone or this computer is for the rich and not for me. I think we have not realised that when the rich in our society get richer, everyone spends more money because we cannot acknowledge a divide between the rich and the ordinary. When we put the children of rich people in the same state-run schools as everyone else, we exert pressure on poorer families to spend beyond their means to keep up. Because they will not tell their children, “We are poor and they are rich.”’

I wonder if this idea explains the apparently disproportionate outrage at Mark’s and my interest in used clothes and furniture. We are poor and they are rich. Coming from Canada and the UK we find nothing unusual or disruptive in this idea, nothing that affects our self-esteem, but in Iceland such a statement threatens national identity.

You should come to our place, says Mark suddenly. If you’d like to. I don’t invite Icelanders much. We like the way we live but sometimes I’m ashamed. Most of our friends live in houses with so much plastic and glass and chrome, and we know people who are horrified by our place, but you–

I’d like to come, I tell him. It sounds like a nice place to live.

It takes us a few weeks, with his new son and my repeatedly postponed trip to Singapore, but late in May we manage it. I meet Mark at Álafoss wool mill, which he says I will like. ‘Foss’ means ‘waterfall’; it’s an early twentieth-century building on the river, where Icelandic wool was first processed industrially. The river is fed by hot springs and warm enough that they used to wash the wool in it as well as using its energy to power the carding and spinning machines. There’s still one central yarn factory processing almost all Icelandic wool into one of four weights, but it has moved and the mill is now a shop and a kind of tourist attraction, although only tourists with a passion for knitting or old knitting machinery are likely to be much excited by it. Mark lingers over the hardcore stuff, the sort of wool you have to twist with your fingers as you knit, while I flutter around the Danish imports. There are big buttons and toggles made of horn and bone, and stripy wooden knitting needles. Mark shows me around the rest of the store, part shop and part museum. There are handmade sweaters knitted in soft colours according to traditional patterns, and cheaper, machine-knit ones in bright shades. There are sealskin slippers and silver fox fur hats, and sheepskin gloves which I would want if we were staying for another winter. The original knitting machines, looking like the wartime telegraph equipment at Dover Castle, are out back, facing over the river towards the green slopes of Esja. They date from the 1890s, still, Mark remarks casually, a couple of generations older than the Icelandic sweater.

What? I didn’t think Icelandic sweaters went back to the sagas, though only because the research for my most recent novel involved some investigation of the early history of knitting, but I thought they were at least pre-industrial. Nope, says Mark, they’re not even part of the invention of national tradition in the late nineteenth century. Post-war.

Oh, I say, and then inadvertently administer a return shock. You mean it’s a twentieth-century version of Walter Scott and kilts?

We stand there, me holding more balls of stripy sock wool than I can quite control, and discuss nationhood and myth-making among the mittens. Icelanders, says Mark, generalising grandiloquently as foreigners do, believe the whole lot. They think revisionist history is a form of treachery. Well, I say, that’s kind of the point.

We get in the Volvo and Mark directs me to his house. We’re driving along gravel roads and I’m equally worried about making a fool of myself by driving idiotically slowly or skidding off the road, but when I remember to look around I can see exactly why he chose to live here. The track runs between