The Promise of Iceland
Kari Gislason
The Promise of Iceland
Kari Gislason
Born from a secret liaison between a British mother and an Icelandic father, Kari Gislason was the subject of a promise - a promise elicited from his father to not reveal his identity. The Icelandic city of Reykjavik, where Kari was born, was also home to his father and his father’s wife and four children - none of whom knew of Kari’s existence. Moving regularly between Iceland and Australia, he grew up aware of his father’s identity, but understanding that it was the subject of a secret pact between his parents. At the age of 27, he makes a decision to break the pact and contacts his father’s other family. What follows, and what leads him there, makes for a riveting journey over landscapes, time and memory. Kari travels from the freezing cold winters of Iceland to the shark net at Sydney’s Balmoral, to an unsettled life in the English countryside to the harsh yellow summer of Brisbane and back again. He traces the steps of his mother who, in the mid-1960s, answered an ad in The Times for an English-speaking secretary and found herself in Iceland among the ‘Army of Foreign Secretaries’, and in the arms of a secret lover. Iceland becomes the substitute for the father Kari never really knew as he discovers the meaning of ‘home’ and closes the circle of his own fatherless life.
Review
Hannah Kent
Kári Gíslason was born a secret. The love child of an Australian secretary and a married Icelandic man, he grew up understanding that his father’s identity must never be revealed. Shuttled back and forth betweenAustralia, England and Iceland, Kári decided, at the age of 27, to defy his father’s plea for anonymity, and travelled to Iceland to introduce himself to the half-siblings and family he had never known. What led him to this decision, and what followed, is an engrossing account of love, culturaldifference, and what it is to yearn for heima (to be at home).
Kári’s search for his father’s acknowledgement provides the narrative structure of this memoir, but the true delight of this book lies in Kári’s consideration of Iceland, Icelanders and their ‘specialisation in the painful love of one’s country’. Falling ‘hopelessly in love’ with Iceland himself, Kári sees in the small Nordic island the possibility of belonging; it is a substitute for his elusive father. He writes with an intrinsic understanding of what makes Iceland so winsome and beguiling, and his observations on the quirks of Icelanders are spot-on: their hostility to strangers, their desire for independence, their self-reliance and their inexplicable, powerful nostalgia for their homeland: ‘You could be homesick even when you were home.’
This is one of the better kinds of memoir – one in which the author is not only reflective, but also reflexive. Kári demonstrates an awareness of the fallibility of memory, of subjectivity, and his own shortcomings as a writer and son. He is an undoubted Icelandophile, but there is little fawning – his prose is direct but unhurried, and demonstrates those qualities he attributes to the Icelanders: self-deprecatory wit, profundity and a prying inquisitiveness into the lives of others.
Hannah Kent is deputy editor of
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