The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland by Bill Holm (2007) is a memoir by the sixty-ish-year-old Minnesota-born poet, musician, travel writer, and polemicist. He has Icelandic ancestry and has taken time away from his global travels to write about his heritage: ‘my home, my citizenship, my burden.’
Brimnes, the village, ‘looks like a construction project that has run out of funds.’ Brimnes is also the name of the fisherman’s cottage he bought in 1998 on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. It is remote and stark, where ‘most of the country lives within spitting distance of salt water.‘ He has an expanse of the sea in front of him and ‘birds beyond the window’ – the two sounds he hears daily. Everyone knows his name. Everyone knows the ‘crazy American.’
American astronauts used to train for the moon landing in the rugged terrain of Iceland. After setting the scene and landscape – ‘a landscape not unlike the one that awaited them’ – he mentions the turf full of stories about elves and magic springs. He describes the fog and its ‘blank weatherlessness’ that has ‘psychological implications for human beings’ known as ‘interior fog.’
The author describes the arctic fox, the raven, the horse, and numerous sea birds: oystercatcher, plover, snipe, whimbrel, and so on – and the Icelandic poems to honour them.
He writes of his ancestry and genealogy: ‘Every Icelandic story, whether the ancient sagas or the lively gossip around the coffee table, begins with the ritual chronicling of the aett – family history.’
He writes about silence and noise, and music: ‘All composers worth their salt use silence. How can we know what music is if we do not know its absence?’ Brimnes, the cottage, has no television, computer, phone, VCR, or radio. ‘A cheap CD player’ is mostly unused, especially when he has company, for they listen to the sound of each other’s voices without distraction.
Like the life Bill Holm lives in Brimnes, the book is his singular and peaceful perspective of what makes a place home.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.
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