Amazon.com
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
From Publishers Weekly
Seeking a refuge to heal his grief over the death of his mother, who was stabbed by a burglar in her Pennsylvania home, Fergus took his wife, Nancy, and their eight-year-old son, Will, to unlikely Iceland for three months in the summer of 1996. The respite did its work. Living in a friend's abandoned, isolated concrete house called Little Lava, the family spent its days hiking; Fergus (Swamp Screamer) also fished and kayaked. He writes lyrically about the natural world the family encountered, birds, in particular eagles, volcanic mountains, marshes. The emptiness of the landscape reflected Fergus's own emptiness, yet Little Lava, bound by marsh, mountains and sea, proved hospitable. He fills his book with Icelandic folklore and tells us about the country's history and simple economy in which people depend on farming and fishing for their livelihood. In that summer's perpetual light, tragedy again visited the family, however, when a young niece was killed in the explosion of a TWA aircraft off the coast of New York. But most vivid here is the natural world, written about with such vibrancy readers will yearn to visit this land at the edge of nowhere. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Many of the best natural histories tell stories of personal transformation. Fergus had intended for his summer in Iceland to be an opportunity to observe the geology and wildlife of this remote country, but in the aftermath of his mother's murder, it also became a place of solace and reaffirmation. (LJ Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Angeline Goreau
There are many pleasures to be had in Fergus's late-20th-century restaging of Walden, but the passionate imaginative life of the place seems oddly absent.
From Booklist
Plans were under way for Fergus and his family to enjoy a summer idyll amid the rugged solitude and harsh beauty of Iceland. Having resolved to set up housekeeping in a remote cabin--in a coastal locale some 50 miles north of Reykjavik--Fergus and his wife contemplated enjoying the rarefied surroundings sequestered with their son. Then, in a random act of violence before the anticipated trip, Fergus' mother was brutally murdered in her home. How does one cope with a tragic loss of such magnitude? The subsequent journey provided Fergus with an opportunity to deal with his own grief. In this compelling journal of days living at Little Lava, Fergus observes Iceland's natural history firsthand: recording encounters with bird life and his experiences exploring the country's volcanic terrain, all the while demonstrating subtlety and strength as he finds his way through the painful process of healing. Alice Joyce
From Kirkus Reviews
A compelling mix of adventure, travel, natural history, and emotional recovery set against the exotic backdrop of an Icelandic summer. Nine months after his mother was stabbed to death by an intruder, Fergus retreated to Iceland for a healing season with his wife and 8-year-old son in a rudimentary sea cottage they called Little Lava. The solitude and privation (it's reachable only by crossing a lava field and tidal flats, and then only at low tide; there's no running water or electricity) are just what he needs to rebuild his life. Though he comes to terms with his mother's death, the emotional rapprochement takes place offstage, and grief remains a subtext. The real focus is Iceland itself. For Fergus, a sportsman and naturalist (Swamp Screamer: At Large with the Florida Panther, 1996; A Rough-Shooting Dog: Reflections from Thick and Uncivil Sorts of Places, 1991), the country is both analogue and anodyne to his grief. ``In Iceland I reveled in the emptiness of the land, which reflected the emptiness inside me,'' he writes, but the oddities of a northern summer (which features 24 hours of daylight and weather by turns harsh and idyllic) and the elemental nature of his accommodations help him to begin functioning again: ``Any act, of work or leisure, any untroubled thought, was an achievement. . . . helped draw me out of bleak and mindless lethargy.'' He spends the interminable days hiking the rugged lava field from which the house takes its name, fishing, mountain climbing, sea kayaking and observing the myriad birds that breed on Iceland's coast. Among his sightings, the discovery of a rare pair of nesting sea eagles stands out. And he evocatively describes Iceland's many volcanoes, its dramatic sagas and bewitching folklore, and the legendary hospitality of its people. No tears, but plenty of convincing testimony to the redemptive powers of nature. (b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book News, Inc.
A poetic account of a year spent by the author with his wife and son living in a remote farmhouse on the west coast of Iceland. The story ranges over the region's geography, bird and animal life, and cultural ways, as well as his own process of healing as he mourned a traumatic death in the family. -- Copyright © 1999 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR All rights reserved Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR
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