Anthropology student Jonathan Brand spends a year living in the Faroe Islands. He is theoretically doing fieldwork, but has a hard time accomplishing much research. He struggles to fit in with the culture while worrying about how others, both locals and his professors in Cambridge, will judge him.
Far Afield is one of my all-time favorite books. It provides a vivid portrait of the remote islands with a perfect balance between realism and culture-clash satire. I first read it in the early 1990s when I was not far removed from my own graduate school experience; I empathized with Jonathan's unstable mix of hubris and self-doubt. Ultimately the main theme of the book is how we each balance our desire to belong to a community with our need to explore beyond that community.
This book is a clear example of how my ratings and reviews say more about me than about the book itself. Objectively, not much happens in Far Afield, and Jonathan's insecurity would surely grate on the nerves of many readers (such as my wife).
Susanna Kaysen is best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted, published a few years after Far Afield. She has published very few books, making Far Afield something of a Confederacy of Dunces situation, a literary one-hit wonder.
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