I just read Far Afield, (Vintage Books, 1990) by Susannah Kaysen, whose memoir, Girl, Interrupted (1993) was made into the movie that launched Angelina Jolie’s film career. Jolie won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors’ Guild award for Best Supporting Actress. Winona Ryder played Kaysen who spent 18 months in a mental hospital. The woman can write. I think she must have written the memoir before she wrote Far Afield, because she was only 18 when she had her breakdown—an alleged suicide attempt. Enough of that.
Far Afield is a delightful book, one that made me laugh out loud at some parts but one with compelling and touching insights that gave me pause. And to think I read it because it was supposed to be a travel book that I am to review for Falkinn, the newsletter of the ICCT (Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto). About the Faroe Islands.
I’ve been to the Faroes but only for a brief stop from a cruise ship, cut even shorter by rough seas and high winds which prevented us from exploring much. We stayed in one place, probably Tórshavn, but I’ll have to look up my diary to confirm that. It was far from the whole year that the hero of Kaysen’s novel spent.
Jonathan Brand is a graduate student in anthropology who decides to spend a year studying the culture of the remote Faroe Islands It couldn’t be more remote or more alien to Jonathan. He spent the previous year studying the language but that didn’t prepare him for the cultural--and culinary—shock he experiences every day. I think he went a year without vegetables, but oy, the fish!!
I just began to read again, tracking my Post-it notes with the descriptions of the food, that is, the fish that he encounters, and I started to laugh again. I’m going to have to re-read the entire book.
But it’s not only about our hero’s confrontation with the fish. Even with his good Faroese he has difficulties understanding the people—motivation, background, attitudes, insights—all so different from his own, and then he has to recognize and then try to understand his own, gob-smacked (at least I was) by his discoveries. Kaysen guides him and us with wit and sympathy.
Set pieces, but never like these, show us, for example, a whale hunt. Grind (rhymes with wind) is Faroese for the pilot whale and also refers to the whale-hunting tradition. Whale blubber is a delicacy Jonathan did not acquire a taste for. Then there’s the personal slaughter of a sheep (in Jonathan’s kitchen) and its bloody dismemberment and dismantling, and the ceremony of the post-grind akvavit and the dancing that followed. (Wow!)
Ah, but I loved the sea and the scenery, all so beautiful and beautifully described, and the storms, terrifying and also beautiful. And what about the Northern Lights? I‘ve seen a lot of Northern Lights, in Canada and in Iceland,but I have never seen them as Susannah Kaysen describes them for me—other-worldly.
There’s more: Jonathan’s strange relationships with the odd people he tries to understand, including himself, or maybe it’s his odd relationships with the strange people. Here’s a simple clue: “…he found his sympathies had shifted.”
I could go on and on and I have.