Deep landscape, symbolic landscape, landscape imbued with uncanny qualities—this is the foundation for the kind of story I love, one that uses earth’s time and space to build its magic. Below are six books that I return to often for inspiration and for pleasure.
Independent People by Halldór Laxness (translated by J.A. Thompson)
Landscape doesn’t care about you, though you may love it dearly. Bjartur is an Icelandic sheep farmer in the early 20th century who, after years of indentured servitude, finally has his own piece of earth. He builds a croft house—animals on the lower floor, humans on the upper—and spends the rest of the novel trying to hang on to his dream. Local folklore suggests that he won’t succeed, as his land is cursed by evil emanating from the nearby burial cairn of the blood-drinking witch Gunnvor. Besides which Bjartur is a crochety fool; the novel’s subtitle, An Epic, is both fitting and a sly mock. He creates difficulty with every single member of his family and drives away his stepdaughter, Asta Sollilja, when she becomes pregnant at fifteen. This novel requires concentrated devotion—there is stoic humor, terrible weather, isolation both geographical and emotional, epic verse swapped among friends, plus sheep, worms, and troublesome neighbors—but all at once you have fallen into it full-heartedly, and want only for the sun to shine in summer, the lambs to survive, and Asta Sollilja to find her way.
Pity the Beast by Robin McLean
This novel begins in hell on earth: a limestone pit for dead animals on Montana ranchlands, where Ginny has been left for dead after a gang rape. She piles up the carcasses to make a staircase up and out of the pit, and escapes on horseback into the nearby mountains. The perpetrators, who include her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister, Ella, form a posse with a string of pack mules to settle the matter once and for all. Their pursuit goes deep into wild territory described offhandedly, beautifully, as in “The cliffs hung warm in last light. By morning the marmots would see their breath.” McLean also reminds us of the world’s impersonal menace, “The sky looked kind, but was it?” and of the constant thrum of time plus history that animates the landscape in every moment. But mostly we remain with the posse and its prey, and we pretend that the earth is not constantly shifting beneath us. I root for Ginny as she flees, and I hold my breath when Ella takes out her sharp scissors or gloams around the posse’s campsite in her nightgown, trying and failing to tame the vastness.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
This book bewitches me every time I pick it up. “I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm,” Macfarlane writes, “with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright.’” Macfarlane first beckons us down to the underland “through the riven trunk of an old ash tree” and leads us on into other dark, far-flung realms historically used “to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.” Among my spooky favorites: underground starless rivers in Italy, limestone burial grounds in Somerset, Norwegian sea caves with painted stick figures more than 2,000 years old, and an eerie nuclear waste storage site deep inside Finland. Wandering in these liminal landscapes where two spheres meet—sometimes tangibly between epochs, at other times hauntingly just beyond comprehension—never fails to launch a multitude of possible story ideas in my imagination.
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (intro by Ali Smith; translated by Thomas Teal)
The story begins matter-of-factly, in third-person. “It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light. Katri screened the lamp so she wouldn’t wake her brother….” Katri is an outcast who lives above the town market, and a sudden and brief POV shift lays down a battle line: “I, Katri Kling, often lie awake at night, thinking.” The Scandinavian winter landscape soon narratively reasserts itself and presses “snow against the windows with a powerful whispering that had followed the people of the village for a long, long time.” Katri walks through the cold “like a tall black monument” and appraises the large house of Anna, a successful, elderly illustrator of children’s books. Anna lives alone, is emotionally vulnerable and longs for the season when she can once again see her true subject, the forest floor. Anna has things that Katri wants and is determined to get, and in the time it takes for a winter snowdrift to melt down and reveal a damp glimpse of earth, Katri and Anna clash irrevocably. Their clash is both cool and tender, like the breath of spring.
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
I usually dislike nostalgia in a novel yet somehow give Cather’s book a pass every time. Jim’s recollections of his childhood friend Ántonia, a Czech immigrant on the Nebraska prairie, are tender and unusual, as when she protects “a little insect of the palest, frailest green” from inclement weather by cushioning it in her hair and gently securing it with a headscarf. Later, Ántonia’s father, a violinist not-long-for-this-earth, “untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he listened as if it were a beautiful sound.” But as Jim and Ántonia grow older, Jim’s fresh eye fades—and who among us has not felt this sad flagging of perception on occasion in ourselves? “On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it…. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.” Well, oof—but let’s escape this sudden pioneer fever dream by flipping back to the freshness of tiny green insects, and also forward to Jim’s ending words: that however life might have beaten them down, “we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes (translated & with an introduction by Daniel Alarcón)
Which book do you desire to press into everyone’s hands? For me it is this memoir in letters, a story of landscape denied. As a small child the painter Emma Reyes lived in (and was often locked into) a windowless room in Bogotá; the nearby garbage heap was her occasional playground. The adult in her life was “a woman I remember only as an enormous tangle of black hair; it covered her completely, and when it was down I’d scream with fright and hide under the bed.” It slowly dawns that this woman, whom Reyes only ever knows as Mrs. Maria, is her mother. They move on to small towns where, if the rooms are still locked, there is a bit more space to breathe; they travel by train or are tied to chairs and carried mounted on mules through the Colombian countryside. Reyes describes the landscape and the people living on it from a rare and astonishing place of unknowing rather than familiarity; one harrowing letter describes a scene along a riverbank that will break your heart. Around the age of five, after her mother abandons her at a train station, Reyes is locked up in a Catholic convent for years. When she escapes and steps outside in her late teens, free for the first time, “In the distance I glimpsed part of a church tower. Before moving farther into the world, I realized it had been a long time since I was a girl. There was no one in the street, except two dogs, one of them sniffing the other’s backside.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nancy Foley grew up in New Mexico. She has been a writer in residence at Hedgebrook, and divides her time between New Mexico and Oregon. I Am Agatha is her first novel.