Sami, I am

>> Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights
Erase Your Name tells a dark story with
a light touch

I almost gave up reading Vendela Vida’s second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, for the same reason I gave up reading her first, And Now You Can Go. There’s something a little too quirky in her opening chapters. Something that undermines the dark subject material. This time, however, I kept reading.

In part, this was because it seemed like such a perfect little book for January: A young woman who, as a teenager, was abandoned by her mother, travels north of the Arctic Circle to find her long lost Sami (the northern Scandinavian people formerly referred to as “Laplanders”) father. And in part because of a weird attraction I share for Samis.

I first came across pictures of them at the British museum, when I was nine, on a family vacation. Since then, I’ve learned a little more. Samis have suffered the usual tragedies of indigenous people: alcoholism, health problems, low employment, discrimination and injustice. On top of these, their native communities have also been flooded by Scandinavian hydro projects, but unlike Quebec, they seem to have had no legal claim to significant financial compensation. They have suffered long and hard. But they herd reindeer and wear elf boots (in pictures anyways), which may have something to do with why the world has never quite made a major cause out of their concerns.

This review will not debate the current situation of Samis. Just to make the point that sometimes we have to look past the quirkiness. I now wish I’d stuck with Vida’s first novel, because this second one is well worth the patience.

It’s not that Vida’s voice grows on you, so much as it loosens up and gets its groove after a jerky start. We first meet narrator Clarissa Iverton in Helsinki, just before she sleeps with the bus driver who has brought her to her hotel. There are some nice touches in the opening, but we move quickly to a stagey flashback on the death of her father, who it turns out isn’t her father, a fact which it turns out her fiancée knew all along. Reading this section is like watching a moody indie film that resents the quotidian task of narrative exposition, so opens with a few quick uncomfortable scenes.

Once we get past that, however, and into Clarissa’s memories of her mother, the book takes off. Vida has a unique wit that manages both to slice away potential sentimentality and mellow some pretty harsh subjects: child abandonment, multiple episodes of rape, mental illness and emotional indifference that borders on cruelty.

Clarissa has had a rough life. Her brother has Down’s syndrome. She has been left to care for him, even when her mother, Olivia, was around. Olivia is clearly emotionally damaged, attaching to people too quickly and intensely and then abandoning them and leaving Clarissa and her stepfather to pick up the wreckage. When Olivia finally abandons the family, her stepfather isn’t surprised. Turns out she had a first husband she abandoned as well.

Olivia named her daughter after Samuel Richardson’s seven-volume novel, Clarissa, about a young woman relentlessly beset upon by the worst society has to offer. Fortunately, Vida’s slim novel is barely more than 200 pages. Her Clarissa is not one to simply guard herself against destiny. She has more of an urge to challenge and change it.

The result is a journey that is dark, but weirdly lit with hope and humour and love. As she cycles back to her life before she sets out on this journey, it’s hard to believe that she will ever be able to escape the desolation of her inner life, let alone find closure in a place as cold and desolate as the one she sets out for. In the end, what she finds is something that she’s known all along, a truth that offers little consolation. In her case, fortunately, the emptiness she finds at the end of the journey becomes the first step towards filling it.

Let The Northern Lights Erase
Your Name by Vendela Vida,
Harper Collins, hc, 227pp, $32.95

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