I have to admit that “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” was definitely not one of my favorite books. I found the main character very hard to relate to, a gap not caused by her ethnicity or life experiences but rather her thoughts, personally and actions being so different from my own. Many times throughout the book, something just seemed a little off, I felt as though she was mentally challenged and I could not follow her thoughts and decision making processes. Usually I can get past gaps and borders in the text if can at least relate to the character at some level but I just had a really hard time doing this.
As more of her story became revealed and where she came from, her personality, actions and impulses began to make a little more sense, not because they were logical but because they came from her past. Her mother was a mentally disturbed woman, not necessarily because she was born that way but because of the trauma she experienced throughout her life. Clarissa’s life turned out to be rather parallel to her mothers and she ended up experiencing many of the same traumas and thus making similar life decisions.
The plot of the book took many unexpected turns although as I became better aquatinted with Clarissa’s character the more I expected crazy unexplained impulses and the more I came accustom to them. By the middle of the book I knew she would never be happy if she went back to her old life so in a way I expected the ending. However, I expected this to be the type of book that would just drop off with absolutely no resolution, probably with her just wandering the world. I was pleasantly surprised when the author concluded with a summary of Clarissa’s new life, it was sort of an unexpected unquestioned happily ever after ending that didn’t really seem to fit with the rest of the book.
For my Narrative sequence paper I think I will do a close reading of selected pieces from page 161-168 in the chapter ‘Empty Chair, Hanging from Tree’. I feel that this section is a microcosm of all the major events and themes of the book. The section starts with her looking for her father, the man who raped her mom, when for the first time unbeknownst to her she hears of her biological father for the first time. In the next section she takes a trip to the Sami parliament, symbolic of her larger journey, during which the scene in the parking lot takes place which is very insightful and full of symbolism and microcosmic events. By this time in the story she has pretty much given up on ever finding her mother, but on her trip back a woman out of the blue tells her of her mother’s whereabouts.
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