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Hopefully I'll find something about Iceland in the near future that actually celebrates Iceland, but from what I got of this book, The Windows of Brimnes is not it. By the time I'd gotten to page twenty, I was eager to exercise the fifty-page rule on this book, and when I got to page fifty, I did. Even when I agree with him, it gets old fast.
Pity that, because Iceland is one of those places about which few travel monologues seem to exist, at least in this country, and I've always been rather fascinated with it. This is a quality that seems entirely absent in Holm. Bill Holm, The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland (Milkweed Editions, 2007)The first sentence of the jacket copy for this book tells us, "Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist--Bill Holm is one of a kind." That may be so, but only the last of those shows up in the first fifty pages of The Windows of Brimnes.
The first two chapters of this book have far less to do with Iceland than they do with Holm's bitterness towards America. (zero) Pity more, because I have often considered relocating to a similarly desolate place for much the same reasons Holm lays out here ("[The United States] has gotten too big, too noisy, too populated, too frenzied--probably too brainlessly religious, media crazed, shopaholic, and warlike for me to see anything but a vast cloud of human white noise." --20), though my preference has always been the Orkney Isles.Still, that small passage gives you a taste of the polemic Holm spins here.
I'm a fan of rant, usually, but I like it to be punctuated with humor, or at least snide wit.
A wonderful book. That he is also a poet comes through in his prose. I always enjoy Holm's writing and this book continues that sentiment. His feeling for the land of his ancestors comes through in each chapter.
He is a brilliant essayist. Bill Holm takes his readers with him as he settles down along the northern coast of Iceland in a cottage close to where his ancestors had lived before emigrating in the 19th century. For those new to Holm's writing, the book will reveal his sharp eye for detail, the breadth of his research, and his great heart as he shares a sense of going home to the land of his forebears.
Instead, I found a book about an American, that wishes he was not in his words "burdened by America". It was with eager anticipation that I started this book anxious to hear a different tale - that of an American in Iceland. After all, we do bring the "baggage" of home with us wherever we go. Books like this are often excellent armchair co-pilots as they transport us to a place of interest. His contempt for America, and his sneers at those who are not poets and musicians - after all the world in his view would be a much better place if we all embraced the arts and shunned commercial pursuits -made the writer an utterly unlikable fellow. This author is anything but. It's almost a given that the writer will be someone we would like to have as a travel companion - to share their stories first hand, to raise a glass with, etc. I am fascinated by Iceland - it is a wonderful country.
Paul says we see only `though a glass darkly.' Maybe the sea, so big, so deep, so beyond our power to order, so completely without opinions about what it swallows or what gifts it gives, can provide us with clearer views of our own lives, our country, our connection to others and to history. For Bill Holm, it is the remote microcosm of Iceland, home to far more birds than people. If, in addition, the sea is flooded with unending light for three months [every summer], we might more clearly apprehend whatever wisdom arrived through those windows."Reading The Windows of Brimnes, I often thought of Henry David Thoreau and his journal of living in a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond. It will be a strange reader who doesn't long to find a way to get there, if only for a visit. Their Icelandic-made stove is older they are but does all a stove needs to do, with the not insignificant advantage that the fish cooked on it were swimming in local waters just an hour or two before arriving in the Holm's kitchen.Holm writes: "When Americans ask me to describe my little house, I tell then, not entirely disingenuously, that it a series of magical windows with a few simple boards to hold them up, to protect your head from rain while you stare out at the sea."As a boy growing up on the prairie, about as far from an ocean as it is possible to be, he read books of adventures at sea -- Moby Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, etc. Some years back, Bill Holm, a writer and poet of Icelandic descent, decided to visit the island his ancestors had left behind when they immigrated to Minnesota. He not only found himself happy to be there, but has since become one of Iceland's part-time residents, having bought a small house named Brimnes in a village, Hofsos, along one of the country's northern fjords. In Iceland he found what he had been looking for.Returning to the theme of windows, he writes:"We do not see reality -- or nature -- directly," he writes, "but always through a window of some sort.
St. He makes Iceland come to life as has no other book or essay about Iceland I've read in the past. Holm's book serves as an invitation to the reader to a find a place where, even if the windows one sees through have not become cleansed of every impurity, nonetheless give us a truer view of the actual world that we normally see with dimmed eyes though unwashed panes.For a book like this to work, it cannot be general. At the same time, the book is less an invitation to visit Iceland than a summons to step off the highways we find ourselves captives of and to live a more contemplative life. For Thoreau it was Walden Pond. These windows are often physical, the window of our `place,' our experience, our particular angle onto nature. It has to be rooted in a specific place. Mainly he and his wife are there for the summer but sometimes they manage winter visits as well, when Iceland's "spareness is magnified by snow and darkness." It's a simple life.
If Thoreau had been born in 1943 instead of 1817 and made his way to a small Icelandic house gazing out over the cold water of a fjord, his writing would be hard to tell apart from that of Bill Holm: a luminously written report of what he has been looking at and listening to with unhurried, undivided attention, mixed with the occasional ruminations regarding the not-so-far-away mad world he has fled from. The events of our lives, both private and public, spiritual and political, enter consciousness through these dirty, smudged, undersized windows. -- and dreamt one day of finding his way to the world where land gave way to endless water with its tides and rollers utterly indifferent to all headlines, ambitions, ideologies and advertisements. But they can also be mental, the window of our prejudices, ignorance, ancestors, income, the boundaries we erect around the imagination.
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