The heroine of Let the Northern
Lights Erase Your Name has a mysteriously absent mother
who deserted the family when Clarissa (the clue is in
the name) was 14; as the novel begins, she discovers
after her much-loved father dies suddenly that he wasn't
her father at all. Instead, according to her birth
certificate, she is the daughter of a Sami priest in
far-off Finnish Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. Trauma
and travel are set in place and Clarissa ditches her
past life; walking away from her Manhattan home and
fiancé, she heads north to the snowy wastes to seek out
the short, dark strangers to modern life, who live for
and with reindeer at the top of the world.
But a proper story is never a straight line of
quest and discovery. All certainties, even the new ones, must be
overturned if the hero/heroine is to be remade. The Sami priest was
indeed the first husband of Clarissa's mother, but the plot is deeper
and thicker than mere cultural alienation. On her journey she meets wise
old Sami women and innocent young Sami men. She eats reindeer meat and
drinks reindeer blood. She comes down with the kind of fever that has
heroines all over fiction collapsing in the snow, only to be saved by
passing strangers who turn out to have a vital connection to the search
for truth. There is long, slow recovery and the stirrings of renewal of
spirit and life
The truth of Clarissa's story changes and
darkens. She hears about old sexual violence that makes narrative sense
of similar events in her own life. Even worse is to come, so that the
nearly happy ending of a kind alternative father, the good priest who
was her mother's first husband, transforms into the discovery of an
altogether more grim begetting and begetter.
In her Acknowledgements, Vendela Vida thanks
Galen Strawson for an article that got her thinking about "the kind of
person who would see their past as unconnected to their present". This
was the mainspring of her novel. Clarissa, discovering her life to have
been a lie (or, rather, that those she loved had lied to her) makes her
journey and then remakes her life. The melodramatic nature of her
discovery, and the geographical extremes she has to go to in order to
resolve the mystery, make her a rare case: most people engage in much
more quotidian struggles to connect who they were to who they are.
Clarissa's disconnection between her then and now doesn't seem
particularly unusual - only the lengths to which she has to go to
realise it mark her out; for my taste, far too clearly as the heroine of
a novel in search of the somewhere else of fiction.
