Names for the Sea

In her non-fiction book Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (2012), English author Sarah Moss chronicles the year she and her family spent in Reykjavik, Iceland in the wake of the country's 2008 financial collapse and the so-called Pots and Pans Revolution. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called Names for the Sea a "beautifully written memoir."

For all her life growing up in England, Sarah had heard that Iceland is "the happiest place in the world, a paradise of gender equality, fine schooling, and public art." This feeling was reinforced when she visited the country on a formative camping trip at the age of nineteen with a friend, describing Iceland as "the landscape of our coming of age." So in 2008, Sarah responded to a job posting for a Nineteenth-Century British Literature professor at the University of Iceland, located in Iceland's capital city, Reykjavik. Unfortunately, the same day Sarah accepted the job, the International Monetary Fund had to intervene to save Iceland's economy from a total collapse, leading to tight controls on the country's capital and harsh austerity measures for its people. Thus, the Iceland Sarah found when she relocated with her husband and two infant sons was far from the image of perfection that had taken root in her imagination and memory.

Sarah broadly examines the causes of the 2008 financial crisis in Iceland. In the years before the collapse, three Icelandic banks—Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir—grew dramatically in size. The expansion was fueled by increasingly risky investments enabled by easy access to international credit. As the 2007 global financial crisis took hold, the three banks—known collectively as the "Viking Raiders"—became unable to refinance their short-term debt, leading to runs on deposits and an overall lack of faith in the Icelandic banking industry, which in turn resulted in a severe deprecation of Iceland's currency. By the second quarter of 2008, Iceland's external debt totaled 50 billion pounds, which was seven times greater than the Gross Domestic Product of Iceland in the previous year. To stabilize the economy, much of the banking industry was nationalized, a project funded by a $5.1 billion sovereign debt package from the International Monetary Fund (the IMF) and various Nordic countries. As part of the arrangement, the IMF forced harsh austerity measures on the Icelandic government, leading to a cut in social services at the same time that the economic crisis had caused spikes in unemployment and bankruptcies.



This state of affairs led to widespread social unrest among Iceland's people, with protests intensifying in January of 2009. The protests came to be known as the Pots and Pans Revolution, due to the protesters' banging kitchenware together in the streets. After days of protesters clashing with riot police and pelting eggs and snowballs at government buildings and vehicles, the Icelandic government announced that it would hold early Parliamentary elections so citizens would have a chance to replace some of the politicians they blamed for the handling of the financial crisis.

By the time Sarah moved to Reykjavik, it was the summer of 2009. With her husband and sons, Sarah moved into a flat in a wealthier housing development that had been largely abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis. Her lectureship in Romantic poetry and creative writing would now pay her one-third less than previously announced. Arguably, the biggest hardship the family faced was the lack of a car. With very little public transportation and a widespread lack of maintained sidewalks and paved roads, Reykjavik is a city where virtually everyone relies on a car, usually an SUV. In this way, Reykjavik still feels like a city of excess to Sarah, despite the austerity measures implemented in the wake of the financial collapse. She recalls pushing her sons in strollers across freeways and lava fields.

The view outside Sarah's flat's window was not the one of visual splendor she remembered from her youth but rather one of concrete and construction equipment. At least during the summer, she writes, it was light all the time, as she recalls the strange sight of a man washing his car at midnight. However, when the long nights of winter arrived that year, it became more difficult to keep her and her family's spirits up. She begins to characterize the landscape as exceedingly hostile, as the family endured regular volcanic eruptions and geyser explosions, of which the vibrations allowed brown dust to seep into the family's food and cookware.



Finally, spring arrived to alleviate the darkness and gloom. Sarah and her family took an excursion into the hinterlands to a small icecap region known as Eyjafjallajökull. There, Sarah met locals who believed wholeheartedly in the existence of Hidden People, supernatural elves that inhabit a parallel universe and can make themselves visible to humans at will. Later, back in Reykjavik, the volcano erupted properly, confining the family to the flat, which barely protected them from the onslaught of brown dust and ash. In the end, Sarah concludes that she was too busy merely surviving to sufficiently explore and document the Icelandic people and landscape: "We haven’t bathed in a natural hot spring. I haven’t learned to knit the Icelandic way. We haven’t traveled more than a day’s journey from Reykjavik."