A number of digital workshops and classes I’ve attended suggest that people who start blogs tend to abandon them after a few entries. Bookedfortravel would seem to fit that description. However, I’ve decided to try to resuscitate it with a monthly offering about the books I’m reading, connections to other books and essays, and their connections to places they take the reader.
We recently returned from a late winter visit to our daughter and her husband in Akureyri Iceland. Our son-in-law tells us that Akureryri has everything you need and nothing you don’t. After our third visit, I find I can agree. There’s a bookstore (https://www.penninn.is/); a yarn store (https://garnigangi.is/); a museum, a number of lovely restaurants, hotels, and spa (https://www.forestlagoon.is/).
I’m something of a yarn tourist; I locate local yarn shops on my travels and buy a local yarn. Sometimes the yarn is fully harvested and processed locally, and sometimes it’s processed elsewhere and dyed locally (https://systrabond.is/contact/)
In addition to the yarn and several buttons I’ll use for various projects, I was caught by a Laine: Finnish Knits. What particularly caught my eye was an article title on the cover, “Crime Writer Satu Rämö: Why knitting is at the heart of her hit novels.” I’d not heard of this writer, so a second trip to the bookstore was required.
On our first trip to Penninn/Eymundsson earlier that day, we scanned the table of mystery/thrillers by Icelandic writers in English translation. We had read almost everything on the table: Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Ragnar Jonasson, Eva Bjork Ægisdottir, Arnaldur Indridasson, Olaf Olafsson. So, sadly, we left empty-handed. Having a new (to us) author and a mission to find her books, we returned to PE, and found Rämö’s first two novels: The Clues in the Fjord, and The Grave in the Ice.
Our second trip to P/E had us looking a bit deeper into the wide variety of English language books on offer. I was surprised (in my parochial perception) by the number and variety of current English language fiction titles. It was among those that I found the books I was looking for as well as a couple of Iceland thrillers we had not read and had overlooked on our first foray.
The novels by Satu Rämö are set in the Westfjords, a remote and not easily accessible area of the country. If you look at a map of Iceland, the Westfjords are the bit that look like a hand sticking out to the left. Hildur, the protagonist, is the only police detective in the region, a daughter of the Westfjords, with a traumatic family history. She is partnered with an intern police office, an exchange from Finland, Jakob. The knitting connection–why the author was mentioned on the cover of a knitting magazine–is Jakob, who took up knitting as a mental health exercise following a contentious divorce and custody battle.
The opening pages of The Clues in the Fjord echo the historical Icelandic sagas, offering a foreshadowing event: “She and Haraldur ought never have met, but they did. And they had an exceptionally large brood of offspring” (p. 6). That chapter heading is Summer 1550. The novel itself is largely set in November 2019. Landscape, weather, isolation, small community are crucial characters in the novel.
I enjoyed the novel although initially I found it a bit cumbersome with explanations of Iceland and Icelandic culture that seemed a bit too tourist-guide. That diminished as the book progressed, and I haven’t noticed it in the second novel, The Grave in the Ice.
In addition to spending time with our daughter and son-in-law, a rare treat, our short trip to Akureyri allowed me to indulge in my two vices, buying books and buying yarn. And how fortuitous that a yarn store led me to an author I had not known about.
Booked for Travel 