[ book tip by Claudia Gremler ] Vendela Vida’s exciting second novel is an emotional, yet soberly written, story of loss and the search for identity. When Clarissa’s father, Richard, dies unexpectedly her whole world crumbles around her as she discovers that he was not her biological father. Her strong sense of betrayal is exacerbated by her deeply problematic relationship with her mother who abandoned her when Clarissa was a teenager, unexpectedly walking out and simply disappearing from one day to the next, without saying goodbye. Suddenly bereft of both parents and betrayed by her fiancé who, it turns out, knew that Richard was not Clarissa’s father, she decides to find the person on her birth certificate, her real father who lives in Finland.

With a sense of determined desperation, Clarissa goes on her quest and experiences yet more rejection and confusion as the man she now believes to be her father, her mother’s first husband, explains to her that he feels no obligation towards her. She is not is daughter, she is the result of a rape. With hindsight some of her mother’s remarks and her attitude towards Clarissa now become clearer, but at the same time Clarissa experiences such a violent reaction to the news that she is plunged into an even deeper, life threatening crisis. The remainder of the book sees her continue to struggle for orientation as well as struggle with her mother when they finally come face to face. In the end nothing will ever be the same for Clarissa and she faces similarly life changing choices as her mother did.

Vida convincingly and compellingly describes Clarissa’s painful odyssey through the strange and uninviting north with the foreign, frozen landscape suitably setting the scene for Clarissa’s attempts to overcome her emotional alienation. As Clarissa, whose job is in movie subtitling, struggles to make sense of the situation and fill in the gaps in her own and her mother’s existence, her often futile endeavours to understand are very obviously, yet not overbearingly, reflected in the restricted use of English she encounters north of the arctic circle. Her reactions to these linguistic challenges again allow the reader to follow her inner journey from arrogant American to lost little girl and onwards to a mature, more self-determined person building a new life – down south.

[ Favourite quote ] 'And when I would hear people say that you can't start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think "You can. You must".'

[ book info ] Vida, Vendela: Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name. (original language: English) Atlantic Books, London, 2007 (2007). ISBN: 9781843545828.