Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

I really love the name of Vendela Vida's book - Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name - it's so haunting. I have to admit that it was one of the reasons I wanted to read this book. The other reason was that it's a book partly based in Finnish Lapland.

Clarissa has just buried her father when she finds out that he wasn't her real dad after all. Her birth certificate says that her biological father is a Sami (the indigenous people of Lapland) living in Finnish Lapland. Clarissa decides to drop everything, leave her finacé and her disabled brother behind and travel to Finland to look for her roots. After all, she's experienced her mother dropping everything and dissapearing when she was a teenager. But in the end, what Clarissa finds in Lapland isn't exactly what she was expecting..

I loved this book and actually completed it in one day. I really liked Clarissa even thought the choices she makes aren't ones I'd reccomend. Clarissa comes about as self-centered which can be a bit off-putting. Still, you can't ignore the history she has and the effect it has on these choices. The book is about facing the past, coping with what life brings you, identity and family-ties.

I'm sure readers who don't know anything about Finland or Lapland will find the potrayal interesting. BUT being Finnish, I was very amused with some aspects of the book - the author really hadn't done her reasearch properly, mixing up Finland and Iceland and her own (?) imagination. I understand that the audience she's writing for is clueless about Finland but once a Finn or someone who has been to Finland reads a book like this, the mistakes are obvious.

First-of-all, when Clarissa arrives in Finland she takes the hotel shuttle bus to the hotel and the driver checks her into the hotel. Hmm.. there are no shuttle buses for hotels in Helsinki and the driver would never check the customers in - Helsinki is the capital of Finland, not some small rural town! I doubt that would even happen there. Second, Clarissa showers in sulphur smelling water - there's no such water in Helsinki, you'd have to travel to Iceland to experience that. The people in church kneel to pray, which I've never heard of in Finland, at least not in the kind of congregation Vida describes it happening in. 

Here's is my favourite mix-up:

"The desk in my Helsinki hotel room had a thin phone book in its top drawer. Finland was so small that every listing fit into the same volume, the numbers organized by town."

There are over five million people living in Finland and you most certainly cannot fit them all into a thin phone book! Iceland has 317,630 inhabitants, so maybe Vida mixed the two countries here as well. I'm not an expert in Sami culture but there seemed to be some inconsistencies there as well.

Saying that, I still enjoyed the book and recommend it to everyone but please take the descriptions of Lapland, Finland and the Sami people with a grain of salt.