Alma Sóley Wolf was 14 years old the night a large mass of snow crept through the window of the room where she slept and hung her for forty minutes, until the rescue teams arrived.
Alma Sóley Wolf explains this experience naturally. It is not the first avalanche to bury Flateyri, the village where he lives, in a fjord in the north-west of Iceland. Éric Lluent, journalist and contributor to La Vanguardia, takes note. The cold fascinates him. One day he dives into the icy water of the Laugarvtn to find out what it feels like. He writes that it is like a hammer blow to the chest and lungs. Stay submerged for twenty seconds and take two minutes to catch your breath.
In Lluent’s book, Iceland, the island of the wind (Ara Llibres) there is ice, snow, peat, sandstorms, earthquakes and volcanoes. When they erupt, Luent runs to be the first to see it. Without ice and fire, he reasons, without feeling the extreme living conditions in which they live, it is impossible to understand Icelanders.
There are guides about Iceland that look like postcards, and books by journalists that look like love letters, disturbed by the beauty of the island. Lluent has written a book that is also personal. From the exoticism of his first trip in 2008, motivated by the chance encounter with two native women at the Gràcia festivities, to his conversion to Icelandic by adoption. The book explains this infatuation. And he describes an island more real, but just as fascinating as the one he discovered in his early days.
Lluent tours farms that survive in a precarious balance between flocks of sheep that seem to have come out of a Nordic design catalog; he gets lost in the long night of Reykjavík, the capital of a country in transition where crimes – even if minor and mediated by alcohol – have collapsed the penitentiary system and there is a waiting list to enter the prison; reveals that in Iceland, a leader in the fight against climate change, almost all hydroelectric power goes to polluting aluminum smelters.
And he ends up talking about the arctic tern, the seabird that, when bad weather arrives, flees thousands of kilometers away, to return in the spring to the exact piece of grass on which it came out of its shell. Iceland
