Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Lily Gontard

Deception and some kind of love are the themes that thread through the jour­ney that is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (HarperCollins). As one of the edi­tors of the infa­mously cool mag­a­zine The Believer, Vida has a sharp pen and a way with words. Her novel is a fast-paced, almost breath­less first-person nar­ra­tive that begins when the pro­tag­o­nist, Clarissa, loses every­thing that she knew to be her world. Fight or flight, she flees in the guise of a woman search­ing out the truth. Off to Finland, off to the cold, off to a north that she roman­ti­cizes as a place that will give her sat­is­fy­ing answers (and clo­sure), but which reveals instead a dark­ness that is more that just the absence of sun at win­ter sol­stice. I can’t give away too much — it’s a sort of mys­tery, after all. What’s so appeal­ing about this story that I couldn’t put it down is the pac­ing, and Clarissa’s drive to fol­low the clues and find her truth. In the end, all the loose ends tie up into a frayed knot with uneven strands, not unlike real life, that leaves us with con­clu­sions that we live with, though we may wish were different.