The Museum You Will Never See

It's rare that I read a book about "my" Iceland, a book that captures the mix of place and people, nature and culture, history and saga that make Iceland my intellectual homeland. It's even rarer when one of these books is written by a non-Icelander.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, by A. Kendra Greene, is one of these special books, and the best I have found in a long time. Her description of stones first drew me in, when an excerpt from the book was published on LitHub; I read:

"When I say stone, perhaps I should clarify that I do not mean some plain-Jane piece of rock. I mean eye-catching. I mean white whisker-width spines radiating out in clusters like so many cowlicks. I mean a green between celery and mustard, pocked with pinprick bubbles and skimming like a rind over a vein that's crystal clear at the edges but clotting in the middle to the color of cream stirred into weak tea. I mean crystals like a jumble of molars and I mean jasper in oxblood and ocher and clover and sky, sometimes a hunk of one color but more likely a blend of two or three or five, maybe like ice creams melting together, or perhaps like cards stacked in a deck."

Here is a writer describing the indescribable, a writer reaching for words--it's like, it's like, what is it like?--and failing and trying again and, by her persistence, forcing me to see these rocks so clearly that by the end of the paragraph I am holding them in my mind's hand and setting them on the shelf of my own Icelandic rock collection. By the end of the paragraph, I had purchased the book.

I've done this before, purchased a book on the strength of a paragraph, but this time I was not disappointed one bit. The rest of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is just as honest and careful and reaching and, yes, sometimes failing, and persistent in its desire to share this odd collection of museums (some imaginary) and collectors (some unimaginable) that Greene found by traveling around Iceland with her eyes--and her heart--wide open.

I've been visiting Iceland since 1986. Soon after 2008, I noticed a change: little museums were sprouting up everywhere. It seemed as if the Icelanders' response to the global monetary crisis was to rummage through their closets and attics and rediscover their culture--or that their response to the "tourist eruption," after the real eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in 2010, was to corral the crowds into a museum, both to harvest their cash and to keep them from straggling all over the farm or town and getting in the way of real life.

Several of the little museums Greene explores are older than the crash. The Penis Museum dates from 1997, I learned. I've never been. I thought it was tacky; it's not. As Greene explains it, it's rather remarkable. Like many things in Iceland, it started as a joke that got out of hand and ended up being a philosophical inquiry.

The Folk Museum at Skogar, founded in 1949, is one of my favorite places in Iceland. I described it this way in an earlier blog post: "In addition to a collection of old houses, fully furnished, there's a separate building of several rooms stuffed with what can only be described as, well, stuff. There are books and embroideries and a two-stringed fiddle. There are birds' eggs, skeletons, rocks, pinned insects, pressed flowers, and a stuffed two-headed sheep. There are busts of several local dignitaries and two paintings by one of Iceland's most famous artists, Kjarval, in the basement, along with some mid-20th-century living room furniture and a famous writer's studio. There's a fishing boat. There's an excellent description of how to make spoons from cows' horns." (See "An Icelandic Horse Hair Tale.") There's also a lovely array of children's bone toys:

According to Greene, there are some 15,000 objects at Skogar, displayed in no particular order. "This is a museum without sequence," she writes. "Even the guides say you can start anywhere. It all links, they say." And then she proceeds to prove that bold statement true. "And it's all here, the collection and the curator and the museum and the parking lot and the tour buses and maybe the garden, too, all because this someone in this someplace, a long time ago, was given a quest." Following Greene as she follows this someone on his quest is like taking a little quest of your own through Iceland's fabulous landscape and history.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is itself a museum, a collection of long articles and short essays, illustrations, lists. As a writer Greene is as observant about the Icelandic friends she makes and the historical people she researches as she is about the stones preserved in their collections. Alongside her long investigations of the penis museum, the stone museum, the bird museum, the folk museum, the witchcraft museum, the sea monster museum, and the herring museum, she includes several cabinets of curiosities, vignettes of collectors and their collections and the haphazard links between them. There's "The Museum of the Story I Heard," for instance, and "The Museum of Darkness," and "The Museum of Obligation," of which she writes: "I love this story of undaunted independence, of artistic freedom, of doubling down, of sticking it to the man. But there is a way of telling it that is all about obligation, a telling that is almost meek." And so she frames the story of this one-man museum again, and we realise the first picture she painted was merely the reflection of the place in a puddle.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, and Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums, by A. Kendra Greene, was published in 2020 by Penguin Books. My only complaint is that the text is printed in hard-to-read light blue ink. But I think you'll persevere.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is one of several books about Iceland that I recommend on my Bookshop at https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown. For more on my own latest Iceland-related project, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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