Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water . He is also...
The Windows of Brimnes
Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist—Bill Holm is one of kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing material for a number of rich and memorable books.
In this, his most ambitious work to date—a book “as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever” (Los Angeles Times)—Holm repairs to Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. Looking west from this place of seemingly endless and kaleidoscopic light, and surrounded by little more than the sound of the sea and the birds beyond his windows, he considers America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden.”
In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, The Windows of Brimnes offers a singular perspective that is at once incisive and amusing, provocative and congenial.
Keywords:
adventure, ancestors, communities, cottage, cultural, culture, Europe, expatriates, family, fishing, fjord, history, Icelandic, isolated, isolation, life, living in, memoirs, Minnesota, moving to, northern, remote, roots, Scandinavian, sea, small, solitude, town, travel, travelogues, village, visiting
ISBN:
9781571313102 Publish Date:
11/01/2008
Pages:
248
Size:
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.63 in
Weight:
11.5 oz
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Praise and Prizes
“One can’t help but like Iceland and its inhabitants as Bill Holm hews them on the page. . . . The author himself remains the most captivating phenomenon in view.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Bill Holm, who looks like a cross between Robertson Davies and Father Christmas, is as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever in The Windows of Brimnes. A reader sinks almost immediately into the hands of a master storyteller, a true rambler.”
Los Angeles Times
“Bill Holm writes prose that seems to have honed the font: Words on the page actually seem more sharply etched. The clarity is bracing, shocking, a jolt of literary frisson.”
San Diego Union Tribune
“A good, old-fashioned read you’ll find yourself quoting to friends.”
Jonis Agee
author of The River Wife
“Bill Holm’s life in [this] place of spare beauty will make readers wish they had a Brimnes where they could restore their souls.”
Saint Paul Pioneer Press
“Bill Holm’s voice is inimitable. . . . A pleasure to read and ponder.”
Booklist
*starred review*
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