Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (20 page)

Read Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name Online

Authors: Vendela Vida

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction

BOOK: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

9.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

228 Vendela Vida

Dedications usually appear at the front of a book, but in this case it seems more appropriate to acknowledge the person who was there from the beginning, all the way through, at the end. D: This book is dedicated to you.

About the
Author �
‌

VENDELA VIDA is the author of the critically acclaimed novel
And Now You Can Go and of Girls on the Verge
, a journalistic exploration of female coming-of-age rituals. A founding coeditor of The Believer magazine, she lives with her husband and daughter in northern California

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.comfor exclusive updates on your favorite authors.

Praise
for
‌

Vendela Vida’s

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME

“What a brilliantly constructed lightning-flash of a novel: compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written. Reading this book reminded me of how powerful the novel can be—how addictive and vital—and of how rarely a writer as precise, artful, and passionate as Vendela Vida comes along.”

—George Saunders, author of
In Persuasion Nation

“‘I had hired the new Hungarian florist in town to do the flower arrangement,’ the narrator of Vendela Vida’s new novel says of her father’s funeral. ‘A mistake. A ruby banner hung diagonally, like a beauty contestant’s sash, across a garish bouquet near the casket. In large silver lettering:
BE LOVED
.’ This tone of dark whimsy suffuses the whole book and accounts for much of its peculiarly biting charm. You’ve seen it before, in movies like
Little Miss Sunshine
or
The Royal Tenenbaums
and in books like— well, maybe there aren’t any other books that walk this very fine line between high-camp comedy and the lyrical seriousness that Vida’s title portends:
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
.”

—Madison Smartt Bell,
New York Times Book Review

“Part prayer, part curse, [
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
] is a tightly restrained expression of anger and yearning, a strangled cri de coeur. Across its surface runs a frozen stream of bleak comedy, while tragedy churns underneath.”

—
Washington Post

“Since her mother walked out years earlier, Clarissa, the protagonist of Vida’s accomplished second novel, must go to Finland to find the stranger who fathered her. . . . Vida perfectly captures the emotional dimension of Clarissa’s search, showing that the truth, no matter how pockmarked, is preferable to fiction.” —
People

“Vida gives the icy landscape an eerie, forbidding beauty, and her writing has . . . great emotional acuity.” —
The New Yorker

“The setting is exotic, but the story is timeless. Vendela Vida’s terrific new novel is a taut, tense, terse examination of family and identity. . . .
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
has the grip and pace of a thriller, all but demanding to be read straight through in one sitting, but Vida’s second novel also manages to plumb a host of profound questions during its relentless drama. . . . Vida’s slim novel manages to examine many weighty questions, including the responsibility of parents, the long aftermath of rape, the power of family secrets, the possibility of a creating new life. To be able to raise such matters . . . and still maintain a page-turning pace is a considerable accomplishment, especially in this era when there are way too many doorstop novels bloated on steroids.” —
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Vida’s laconic wit and uncompromising character sketches set her book apart from her generation’s tired quest-for-self genre.”

—
New York
magazine

“In this searing and beautiful novel, a young woman makes her way to the far, far north of the world, where she sets herself the impossible task of learning that which she cannot bear to know. She is funny and fearless and absolutely unforgettable—just like this marvelous book.”

—Ann Packer, author of
The Dive from Clausen’s Pier

“Vida’s evocative descriptions of life in Lapland . . . underscore the themes of isolation and otherworldliness but never overwhelm the core story of Clarissa’s despair. A luminescent and evocative tale of grief, free of the standard clichés.”

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Vida has discovered that rare thing—a people’s untold story— and brought it brilliantly to life. A haunted, moving, gorgeous novel. It glows from within like a building made of snow.”

—Andrew Sean Greer, author of
The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“Vida’s second novel couldn’t be released at a better time: It’s a quick read with surprising warmth and weight, perfect for a cold January weekend indoors. . . . What may linger most vividly with readers is the gelid beauty of the Lapland setting, evoked nicely in Vida’s clean and simple prose.” —
Time Out Chicago

“By the end of this spare, unflinching novel, Vida has successfully gotten away with a provocative assertion: There’s no such thing as closure, and sometimes the best way to heal a family is to rip yourself away from it entirely.” —
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“With grace and precision, Vendela Vida explodes the smallest of details and compresses the widest of landscapes. Intimate and sweeping,
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
dazzles like sun on snow.” —Sean Wilsey, author of
Oh the Glory of It All

“This novel’s evanescent beauty is contained in prose as cool and crystalline as the ice hotel where Clarissa spends a night.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“Vida offers precise, revealing details to describe her characters

. . . and in Clarissa, Vida has created a complex and not always likable heroine who is driven by loss and confusion.

. . . As a feverish Clarissa moves farther into Lapland and into her mother’s past, her search becomes more surreal. . . . This impressionistic quality is reminiscent of other surreal literary searches, like Matsuo Basho’s
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
and Kazuo Ishiguro’s
When We Were Orphans.
In this case, as in those earlier works, the blurring of the line between real and imaginary underscores a larger truth—that any search for a lost person or a buried piece of history is ultimately a search for the self.” —
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A taut, intricately layered page-turner that looks deeply and fearlessly into matters of profound human concern.”

—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Hours

“A taut, darkly witty, and galvanizing tale. . . . Brilliantly distilled, blade-sharp, and as dangerously exhilarating as skating in the dark. A fleet yet emotionally suspenseful tale of a burdened childhood and the liberation of the self.” —
Booklist

“[Vida] is an assured writer with an exact and vivid voice. . . . The book’s solitary, independent heroine and the exotic ancient setting of the book prove transporting. While the story contains surprises, Vida is wise to resist a tidy resolve, a last-minute turn toward faith. . . . A delight.” —
Philadelphia Inquirer

“ A stirring novel. . . . Secrets, lies, revelations, and the shimmering difficulties of just getting on with life permeate Vendela Vida’s second novel. . . .
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
is deceptively slim and easy to read, its intricacy tucked into small phrases and indelible images. . . . [Vida] disguises a world of heartache in brief, matter-of-fact sketches. . . . This book is much darker than her first, but it is as alive and fascinating as the brilliant atmospheric phenomenon of its title.”

—
Chicago Tribune

Also by Vendela Vida
‌

FICTION

And Now You Can Go

NONFICTION

Girls on the Verge

The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
(editor)

Credits�
‌

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover photograph © H. Armstrong Roberts/Robertstock

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME. Copyright

© 2007 by Vendela Vida.
A
ll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat e-Book Reader December 2007

ISBN 978-0-06-156891-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1