Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Embers of the Hands, by Eleanor Barraclough (Norton). This lively history of the Viking Age—which lasted from roughly 750 to 1100 C.E.—moves beyond tales of seafaring warriors to capture everyday people: women, children, merchants, healers, walrus hunters. Given the scant evidence of these histories in the written record, Barraclough seeks them instead in archeological artifacts, from a rune stick found in the rubble of a tavern in Norway reading “GYDA SAYS THAT YOU SHOULD GO HOME” to an amber figurine of a swaddled baby found in Denmark. If each individual artifact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles—from Scandinavia, Western Europe, Newfoundland, and trading posts as far east as present-day Russia—adds depth to the traditional portrait of Viking culture.

Mothers and Sons, by Theodor Kallifatides, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy (Other Press). “When I was little I thought I would die before my mother, according to the principle that the tree outlives its fruit”: so begins this wise and gently funny memoir, in which Kallifatides, a Greek writer who has spent his adult life in Sweden, visits his ninety-two-year-old mother in Athens. His account enfolds many characters, including his brother (“the man who dreamed of affixing windshield wipers to his TV so that he could spit at the screen when he was watching football”), but its heart is conversations between Kallifatides and his mother. “Watching your world fade away while you are still living in it isn’t easy,” Kallifatides observes, yet he praises her “gift of being able to let the small elements of joy defeat the great sorrows.”