He is seventeen and has a fever the day he looks out the window of his house in Lerwick, on the Shetland Islands, and imagines being dragged along the sixtieth parallel. That daydream stuns him and makes him faint. A few months have passed since his father’s death in a car accident, a few months since his plan to settle with him in the south of England to study music fell apart and he returned to live with his mother and brother. For the inhabitants of Shetland, being on the line is a source of pride, a distinctive mark to underline in front of tourists. 60 North is the name of a high school club, a fishing magazine, a radio station, a rental company, a beer. It is omnipresent. It is the nostalgia of the ancient Nordic world of which they were part, before becoming a little corner of the United Kingdom. Those who live along the parallel have to face continuous trials due to the climate and landscape: islands, mountains, tundra, ice, storms and despite the difficulties they do not abandon those places. Starting west, Malachy goes in search of the line, right on Shetland, in the southern part of the Mainland island (the largest island, 80 kilometers long and 32 kilometers wide, with the southern part being a peninsula extending like a finger emerges from the fist), with the map in his hands, one step after another along the cliff, where caves, cavities and gorges abound and where the seals make their noisy presence known. The islands are among the windiest places in Europe and the inhabitants love to tell storm stories to tourists. Without GPS it is not easy to locate the exact point, but the eye eventually catches the line, it corresponds to a fence which once reached the cliff coincides with the parallel. That is the sixtieth parallel north of the equator, the starting point. “Geography begins at the only point you can be sure of. It starts inside. And from there, from within, only one question arises: where am I?”…
“For me, going to the North means returning home, and every journey in this direction brings with it the sense of return. At one time it was unpleasant to me, because it reminded me punctually all the times that I didn’t want to do it. The situation, however, has changed. Two years after returning to Shetland, sixteen years old and fatherless, I discovered another way of leaving, and another way of moving forward.” After several years spent away from home due to university studies in Scotland and Copenhagen and a period of work in Prague, curiosity, restlessness and nostalgia push Malachay Tallack to face the most important experience of his life, an undertaking dreamed of as a teenager in a moment of vulnerability, finally becoming possible ten years later. Already known to Italian readers thanks to the novel The valley at the center of the world, defines the return home as an “act of loyalty”, the push to accomplish his feat is given by the memory of his father, the weight of his absence, which is a constant in the book and in Tallack’s thoughts. The volume dedicated to traveling around the world around the sixtieth parallel allows him to confront himself about his identity, his relationship with his childhood, his home, his mourning, and discover where he belongs. Tallack tackles the narrative of each stage of the journey by describing the places he visits and the way in which the inhabitants interact with him, his impressions of his surroundings and often the comparison with Shetland is inevitable. With a disenchanted gaze he recognizes the weight that the harsh Nordic climate has on the existence of those who live in the most remote areas, but not only that, he enriches his observations with interesting historical anecdotes to allow the reader to understand how a settlement developed and how the connection with nature has been crucial for the social, cultural and economic development of a people: “The relationship between people and places – tension and love, and the forms that such tension and love can take – is the theme main feature of this book.” Journalist, musician (he has published four folk-rock albums) and teacher, Tallack (who was recently appointed director of the Scottish literary magazine Gutter.) in talking about connection with nature is close to the works of the naturalist and writer Robert Macfarlane , also known in Italy for his essays Underland And Wild placesthe latter cited by the same author. The Great North it is the fourth volume published in the I Corvi series, born in 2023, which “brought Iperborea outside the borders of Northern Europe”, with the aim of introducing readers to works that blend “the techniques of literature with the story of reality”.
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