VIAJANDO POR EL PARALELO 60 NORTE ( )

I enjoy travel journals and I enjoy reading about grief (I know that doesn't sound right). In this book by Malachy Tallack, writes about his trip around the world in search of home. The author is a Shetlander. I knew very little about the Shetlands; where it was, who owns the islands. The trip starts and ends with the Shetland Islands and takes the reader west to Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Russia, Finland, Âland, Sweden and Norway. Being from Minnesota, I guess I think I know cold but this being on the 60 degrees is a new concept of cold and marks a border between the northern and the southern parts of the northern hemisphere.

The other part of the travel is the one the author does around his grief and loss of his father when he was young.

Themes that the author explores are varied. He spends a lot of time walking, observing, and meditating. Observations include ways people interact with the environment whether it be wild or community, isolation, engagement, exile, and memory.

Page 37, weather cycles, warm and cold even as far back as the 13th century.
pg 45. (Greenland) "...that their traditional way of life - a way of life that entirely underpins their sense of identity - is under constant threat from the ignorant views of people from outside their country. A kind of moral imperialism..." Alan Herscovici has written that the animal-rights philosophy is widening rather than healing the rift between man and nature...may be more of a symptom of our disease than a cure.
pg 50-51. "When my father died I learned that loss s with us always....Loss isa constant force, a spirit that moves both within and without us. It is an unceasing process that we may choose, if we wish, to bear witness to." By making this choice we free ourselves from lifetime of grief and melancholy and take the offer of firmer sense of joy and beauty.
"Death is at once an ending and a continuation. A breath is given back to the wind, just as ice returns to the sea."
Pg 127. socialism effects on the herders of reindeer. They destroyed way of life and destroyed the family.
pg 141, "the communists built statues, then took them down again. They created monuments to selective memory and to the terrible absence of doubt.
I found the section on Finland especially interesting and learned a great deal. Did no realize that Finnish people are not really Scandinavian. I lived among Finnish people in Minnesota most of my young life and currently live in areas that used to be largely Norwegian. It was very interesting to compare the Finns I knew with those that the author describes. So very similar. So though he premises it is the 60 degrees that impacts the development of people groups it also has to be genetic. The author does a section on the sauna which is one Finish word universally understood. I grew up with saunas, I miss the sauna, so it was fun to read.
Over all and enjoyable travel log, similar to H is for Hawk memoir and A Year of Magical Thinking which also explore grief. I enjoyed learning about these countries, especially the ones I was not familiar with. I wish the maps would have been a bit better, more pictures would have been nice. Though the author tries to say that if you accept loss you can achieve joy, he returns to his Shetland Island and from my observation sinks into melancholy and probably depression. The author is also a singer and songwriter. He is an editor of an online magazine, The Island Review. He currently is not living in Glasgow as of the printing of the cover of the book. My book is published by Pegasus Books, copyright 2016. He has a New Writers Award from Scottish Book Trust in 2014, Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015. ( )

In this book, author Malachy Tallack, a native of Shetland, takes a journey around the sixtieth parallel. He visits Greenland, Canada, the United States (Alaska), Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, to explore each country’s history and culture and how the inhabitants tackle the challenges of living in the north. Along the way he comes to grips with his own past and learns different ways of being from each country he visits.

I enjoyed the travel descriptions rather more than the personal stuff, if I’m being honest. In places it felt repetitive, like these chapters were intended to stand alone as serial essays in a magazine rather than being collected in a book. The Russia chapter was interesting for the glimpse of St. Petersburg, which I’ve seen through the Lucy Worsley documentary about the tsars, and as a Canadian I liked the chapter about Canada, where he visits Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. Each chapter, in fact, had interesting scenes and information. So this is certainly worth borrowing from the library, but perhaps best read when you’re in a more charitable mood than I apparently was when reading it! ( )

When living and studying London Tallack’s father was sadly killed in a car accident. At a total loss he feels the pull of the Northern world once again. Once there he has trouble finding peace, feeling hollowed out by grief. Shetland is on the sixtieth latitude, just short of the Artic circle, and it crosses Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Russia and Northern Europe. Whilst standing by a window looking out over the Atlantic begun to wonder what the other place were like that touched this line as it circled the earth.

He takes time to root himself in the place that is Shetland, travelling to places that are significant to him, marvelling at the Mousa Broch, an Iron age structure still standing, before beginning his odyssey travelling west around the world. But to get to the next country, Greenland, involves a fairly horrendous journey via Denmark and the Netherlands, and flying back over Shetland once again.

Greenland is vast, truly vast, and much colder than Shetland as it isn’t warmed by the Gulf Stream. It is wild too, something that he discovers when he meets the locals, who feel threatened by outsiders who wish to dictate how they should now live. The natives treasure their land, and until outside influences intruded, managed to live with some sort of balance. These external influences mean that the younger generation are now starting to loose some of their instincts for living in the harsh environment. Next is Canada, a country where 40% of its land is above the 60th parallel. It is a place of danger, but of refuge too; a place where people can truly escape the trials and tribulations of modern life. More worryingly for Tallak are bears. Lots of them. And as he is intending on camping at one point, he is getting really worried. Guided by the locals he discovers more than he was expecting about this place.

Alaska beckons. He fishes in a pristine river, with a guy he met in Copenhagen when he was an exchange student there. Spending a lot of his time driving around he comes to know the state and its astonishing scenery. Next is Siberia and Russia, that enormous landmass that reaches from the edge of Alaska to the European landmass and home to only 40 million people. It is a place that holds the ghosts of millions though having been the place of no return that Russians were banished too by regime after regime. The contrast between there and St Petersburg is startling. Built by Peter the Great, its access to the Baltic meant that it was a gateway to the west and is radically different to most other Russian cities. Tallack moves around the city on foot and on the metro discovering how the city lives and breathes.

Finally he crosses the border into Europe, and into Finland, Aland then Norway and Sweden. Finland is pretty unique, it has an utterly different language to its immediate neighbours, and has only been a separate country since the twentieth century. Partaking in a sauna was high on his agenda, not easy with his British reserve though. Aland is different again. It is owned by Finland, feels like Sweden but they themselves say how they are run. The final two countries are almost rushed though as the desire to return home gets more intense.

At times it feels like a regular travel book; author meets and greets the locals; sees the sights; collects some photos and makes you feel a little bit jealous that you are not there too. Usual travelogue fare, but with this book there is a lot more depth too. When Tallack is writing on the loss of his father and the emotional turmoil that this had on his life, there is a rawness and intimacy that you rarely come across in travel books. As he travels away from Shetland he is exploring his own feelings as much as the places he sees. There are few flaws, it is occasionally a little heavy on the history and sometimes the prose can seem a little wooden. Then every now and again you come across a short passage that makes you pause. Then the writing soars and really shows his talent as an author. Well worth reading, provided you don’t mind a little melancholy. ( )

From the evocative opening sentence of Malachy Tallack's moving account of the journey he made, following the 60th parallel westwards, from his home in Shetland, to Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, St Petersburg, Finland and Aland, Sweden and Norway and, finally, back to Shetland, I felt that I was making the journey with him. This is so much more than a collection of descriptive accounts of the physical landscapes he visited, mainly because he reflects on how they, and their inhabitants, have been "shaped" by the history of these places. There are as many differences as there are similarities and he reflects on these as engages with the people he met on his journey. I found all of this fascinating but for me the real strength of his story comes from his moving, often painfully poignant explorations and reflections of the emotional turmoil he had experienced following his father's death (when the author was sixteen) and his need to make sense of his memories and experiences. His eloquent prose, his acute and evocative observations, of not only the external landscapes he was exploring but also his interior "landscapes" of grief and mourning, all combined to make this an unforgettable read for me. I cannot recommend it highly enough. ( )