Vendela Vida Reading Tomorrow Night

Vendela Vida will read from Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name at Harvard Book Store at 6:30 pm.

She's got a poetic name and a poetic book title. Only Vendela Vida's novel digs deeper than words that sound good strung together.

Vida has covered fiction and nonfiction, and she works some great day jobs as the co-editor of The Believer and as a writing teacher at San Francisco's 826 Valencia. In her latest novel, she writes about a young woman whose mother has disappeared and who realizes that the man who raised her is not her father. This jarring revelation pushes her to travel to Lapland to reestablish her identity.

This plot seems standard. Young woman suffers a jolt, and young woman seeks to rebuild her identity through travel. Blah. But critics have raved over Vida's considerable writing abilities. For example, Vida describes Lapland with the following line: "The sun never rose, but at ten-thirty, the sky looked like a dark blue parachute concealing a flame."

Visits from the literary old guard - Paul Auster and Martin Amis - dominated last week, but, if you want to glimpse the future, you might want to hear Vida read.

Image of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name from Amazon.