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Summary
Summary
On the day of her father's funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn't her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and now Clarissa is alone and adrift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fiancé, Pankaj, has just revealed a terrible and life-changing secret to her. In the cycle of a day, all the truths in Clarissa's world become myths and rumors, and she is catapulted out of the life she knew.
She finds her birth certificate, which leads her from New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle, to mystical Lapland, where she believes she'll meet her real father. There, under the northern lights of a sunless winter, Clarissa comes to know the Sami, the indigenous population, and seeks out a local priest, the one man who may hold the key to her origins.Along her travels she meets an elderly Sami healer named Anna Kristine, who has her own secrets, and a handsome young reindeer herder named Henrik, who accompanies Clarissa to a hotel made of ice. There she is confronted with the truth about her mother's past and finally must make a decision about how--and where--to live the rest of her life.
Joan Didion said of Vendela Vida's last book: "And Now You Can Go is so fast, so mesmerizing to read, and so accomplished that it's hard to think of it as a first novel, which it is. Vendela Vida has promise to spare." With Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vida more than lives up to that promise as she gives us a remarkable protagonist who is both fierce and funny, and an unforgettable literary thriller that questions whether we can ever truly know where we've come from--and if it is possible to escape our pasts.
Summary
Zoey Redbird parece haberse convertido en la perfecta pringada. En una semana ha pasado de tener tres novios a cero, y de estar rodeada de un montón de amigos elegidos que confiaban en ella y la apoyaban a ser una marginada. Y hablando de amigas; de las dos que no la abandonan, una es una no muerta, y la otra no está marcada. Y Neferet le ha declarado la guerra a los humanos, cosa que Zoey sabe en lo más hondo de su corazón que está mal. Pero ¿acaso alguien va a hacerle caso? Al final del curso las aventuras de Zoey en la escuela de vampiros toman un rumbo salvaje y peligroso al poner a prueba las lealtades, sacar a la luz las verdaderas intenciones y despertar un antiguo mal en la fascinante cuarta novela de 'La Casa de la Noche'.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Believer co-editor Vida again explores violence, its aftermath and the curative powers of travel in her bleak second novel. (Her debut, 2003's And Now You Can Go, sent a young woman to the Philippines after a traumatic event.) But this time readers are nearly a hundred pages in before the long-ago physical violence is revealed. Clarissa, home after her father's funeral, finds herself deeply alone. Her developmentally disabled brother has never spoken, and her mother walked out on them 14 years before. Digging through family papers, she finds her birth certificate, which lists a stranger as her father. The hunt for him and the resumption of a search for her mother lead Clarissa to far northern Europe, where the days are short, the reindeer are plentiful and her mother had once felt "connected." Clarissa's travels in her mother's steps seeking that connection, stumbling, finding it and finally severing it are bleak. Vida's fan base will welcome this novel, and the twin questions of what Clarissa's amateur sleuthing will turn up and how each discovery will affect her might draw a few new readers through this slim, austere work. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A young woman's sudden identity crisis propels her to the isolated reaches of Lapland in Vida's powerful second novel. Clarissa, a New Yorker in her late 20s, is hit by a pair of emotional shocks within the space of a week: Her father has died of a heart attack, and while rummaging through his possessions, she discovers that he was not her biological father. There's nobody close to comfort her in the midst of this crisis. She's deeply wounded that her fianc, Pankaj, knew and never told her, and her mother has been missing and presumed dead for years. There is nothing for Clarissa to do except fly to Helsinki, get to Lapland--a 21-hour trek by bus and train--and find Eero, the man her birth certificate says is her father. Lapland's austerity and distance from New York is a small comfort, but Clarissa's interactions with the locals reveal that her personal history is even more complicated than she had thought. That learning process unlocks a host of bad memories--being raped as a teenager, looking for her mother in Texas and later holding a funeral for her. This kind of material often gets shaped into a fish-out-of-water tale that closes with comforting reconciliations. But Vida (And Now You Can Go, 2003) is having none of that: This is a sharp, sometimes brutal, portrait of a woman who feels her persona has been wiped away and wants to start over, not heal. Her careful, unadorned prose neatly reveals Clarissa's mix of damage and resolve, echoing Raymond Carver's minimalism while retaining the warmth that so many Carver imitators lack. And Vida's evocative descriptions of life in Lapland--the reindeer herds, the slow pace of the locals, a hotel made of snow and ice--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 clichs. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Vida, coeditor of Believer magazine, follows her canny debut, And Now You Can Go (2003), with a taut, darkly witty, and galvanizing tale of one woman's search for the truth about her parentage. Clarissa's enigmatic mother left her family, including her retarded son, when Clarissa was 14, and vanished without a trace. A dozen years later, Clarissa is languishing in a stale relationship and going nowhere with her work editing movie subtitles when her father abruptly dies, and a gaping hole opens in her past. Now it's Clarissa's turn to disappear as she journeys to Lapland and the world of the Sami, an indigenous people who still herd reindeer. With skilled distillation, Vida evokes a culture on the brink of extinction and a legacy of loss as her anxious yet adventurous protagonist throws herself on the mercy of strangers in an otherworldly realm of deep cold, hard drinking, a hotel constructed of snow and ice, the northern lights, and long memories. Brilliantly distilled, blade-sharp, and as dangerously exhilarating as skating in the dark. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Vida follows up her debut, And Now You Can Go, with this glimpse of life among the native Sami people of Lapland. Clarissa Iverton is a young American woman whose mother abandoned her family years ago. Now Clarissa learns that her recently deceased father was not her real father and also that she is the last one among her family and close friends to know this. She leaves New York and the fianc? she now considers duplicitous to go to Helsinki, then north to Lapland to search for her birth father. There she finds more than she anticipated. Novels about unhappy young people who seek to escape their dysfunctional families and find a new identity are almost a genre to themselves, but the vivid scenes of Lapland, with its reindeer, northern lights, and Ice Hotel, give this novel a unique twist. There is even a whirlwind happy ending of a sort. Recommended for most libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/06.]-Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name A Novel Chapter One It was three in the afternoon when my plane landed at the Helsinki airport, but outside my window, dusk was already settling in like a bruise. I retrieved my suitcase, its handle cold, and stumbled to the tourist information desk, where a woman with good teeth and bad English helped me find a hotel near the train station. My plan was to take the first train north, to Lapland, after a night of sleep. She directed me toward the hotel's free shuttle bus waiting outside. Its doors opened just as I was preparing to knock. The blond bus driver's name tag said Ari, but he told me, the only passenger on the bus, that his name was Kari. The name tag belonged to his twin brother, for whom he was filling in (would I please not tell anybody about that, he asked). When it was clear no one else would be boarding, Ari/Kari turned and spoke to the general area where I was sitting. "We go now," he said. We trailed a snowplow on the road into Helsinki. On the radio, a man's voice sang in English about the pleasures of driving home for Christmas. I asked Kari if he would mind turning it down, and he turned the radio off. The hotel had three stars on the plaque beneath its name--one star more than I was accustomed to--and I experienced the vacuous pride travelers feel when a choice that's been made for them is a good one. Inside, Kari took my luggage upstairs to reception, at which point, he moved behind the counter to check me in. No-smoking, one night, I told him. Shortly after I settled into my room, the phone stuttered a staccato cry, far from an American brrring . It was Kari telling me he'd be getting off work in an hour. "You like to join me in the lobby for a drink?" he asked. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name A Novel . Copyright © by Vendela Vida. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
