As I began Hannah Kent’s memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, I was reminded of her exceptional talent for writing about landscape.

And soon I was absorbed in the place she was describing – Iceland.

…the mountains and valleys and hills undulate as we curve around them, the shining ribbons of river capturing all available light and carrying it out to sea.  

The sky lifts. Everything is drawing breath.

It is almost a parody of summer. It is the promised land illustrated in rhapsodic technicolour in a religious pamphlet. On the clearest days, the blue of the sky hollows me out with its vastness. I feel cleansed by it and, at the same time, subsumed by its enormity. I cannot fit it in. I cannot wrap my mind around it.

The memoir is focused on Kent’s time as an exchange student in Iceland; how the country became her muse; and her subsequent years researching and writing her debut novel, Burial Rites. I could identify with so much of her experience as an exchange student, having done the same thing (to Germany) when I was sixteen. Kent says of Iceland –

Its memory is a constant background to what I am doing. No matter that I don’t make frequent references to the country; it is an equally important part of my life for all that.

I feel the same about Germany, and my exchange was unquestionably one of the most significant and formative experiences of my life. But enough about me! Kent’s telling of her exchange experience and becoming an author unfold in parallel – both begin awkwardly. She initially finds the people in Iceland aloof and the language impenetrable –

For a fleeting instant I think of the four exchange students from my district who went to France. Arseholes.

But that shifts with a new host family, an encouraging teacher, and helping backstage with the local theatre group. On leaving Iceland after her year on exchange, she observes that her ‘…bones have knitted with this place…’ and goes on to describe the feeling of grief associated with returning to her home in Adelaide (grief for a place is known as disenfranchised grief).

It is ultimately through writing that Kent finds her way back to Iceland, or rather, to incorporate Iceland’s ‘hold’ on her.

There’s lots more to this book – her experience of becoming a parent; the history of Iceland’s deeply-held devotion to storytelling (including forms such as rímur) and the role of myth; her childhood ambition to become an author; the challenge and politics of writing about a place that is not your ‘own’; and her struggle to remain true to the history of Agnes Magnúsdóttir (and to this end, Kent kept a quote from German Romantic-thinker, Novalis, in mind – ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’).

I savoured every word of this beautiful memoir and feel a re-read of Burial Rites is in my near future.

4/5

We sit at the table and dip homemade kleinur, cardamom-scented Icelandic donuts, into coffee, and in my conversation with Amma and the wider family I find a new fluency. I begin dreaming* in Icelandic.

*the first time I dreamt in German was wild because I didn’t understand it all…