Description:
Emulating The Outermost House, Henry Beston's classic narrative of a year in a Cape Cod beach house, Summer at Little Lava is a memoir of a man in retreat, seeking to delineate both his inner thoughts and the natural world around him. But instead of the Cape, Charles Fergus goes with his wife and son to the strange and wonderful country of Iceland. Here they spend the summer repairing and inhabiting Litla Hraun, or "Little Lava," a tiny house by the sea. "It seemed to me," Fergus writes, "that, at the end of the twentieth century, one needed to migrate farther from the known world, closer to the earth's conceptual rim, to find a truly fugitive setting. Iceland, to my mind, was itself an outermost house of the Western world." In this "fugitive setting," the author grieves his mother, murdered in a robbery in Pennsylvania only a few months before his departure. This memoir, however, ultimately covers more physical than emotional terrain, as ardent naturalist Fergus takes Iceland itself, a rugged country of volcanoes and fewer than 300,000 people, as his principal subject. It is home to striking landscapes and unusual fauna: lava cones and marshlands, heaths and black-sand beaches, sea eagles and foxes and orca whales. Fergus is a careful observer; he researches and notes Icelandic history and literature, and, with the help of his wife, fluent in the language, meets and learns from its unusual inhabitants--people who live, they say, "with one foot on the land and the other in the sea." --Maria Dolan
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