The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums

by A. Kendra Greene Narrated by A. Kendra Greene

Overview

Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation.

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections—nearly one for every 10 people. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: how to display what can't be seen?

In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes, how a seemingly random assortment of objects—a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams—can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. "The world is chockablock with untold wonders", she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open."

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2020 - AudioFile

A. Kendra Greene’s love for Iceland, its hundreds of quirky museums and private collections, and the people behind these diverse institutions is obvious in her delightful narration of this unusual travel book. Greene’s voice is rich and expressive, and she rolls through the Icelandic words with authenticity. (She thanks her language coach in the acknowledgments.) Her curiosity and enthusiasm are contagious, and the listener is swept along a magical landscape. Greene is impressed and amused by the world’s only phallological museum; a sorcery and witchcraft museum that features necropants, pants made from skin; and collections dedicated to the herring that no longer come to Iceland, stones collected by a factory worker on her daily hikes, and other assortments of objects that don’t seem to have a theme at all. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/02/2020

Artist and Southwest Review associate editor Greene (Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors) delivers a delightful one-of-a-kind journey through some of Iceland’s, if not the world’s, most unusual museums. Greene takes the reader all over the small island nation, from remote Bíldudalur, home of the Icelandic Sea Monster Museum, to tiny Skógar, home to 21 people and to Iceland’s largest museum outside of Reykjavík. The institutions visited range from collections of mundane artifacts from Iceland’s once-thriving herring industry to the most unlikely of museums, the Icelandic Phallological Museum, a “kind of mammal-phallus Noah’s Ark.” Greene turns what easily could have become a mere cabinet of curiosities into a thoughtful and complex work. Insightful meditations on the nature of collecting and writers’ role as organizers and curators of their own work complement passages on Icelandic history, and all add color and context to the museums described. Almost as hard to classify as it would be not to enjoy, Greene’s expertly assembled blend of travel writing, history, museum studies, and memoir proves as memorable as any museum exhibition. (May)

From the Publisher

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
One of Slate’s Ten Best Books of the Year
One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Books About Travel of the Year
Finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award

“I think one of the reasons I loved it so much is that, look, armchair travel is all we’re gonna get this summer, right? And here we’re following this author, who’s a really nice writer, all around an island, visiting dozens and dozens of these tiny, quirky museums that dot the island. I came away just with a real feeling for the place. . . . It really is a wonderful, wonderful little book.” —Tina Jordan, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review, on WNYC’s All of It

“Unseen treasures are hidden in the corners of Iceland—and inside this book. Glittering with whimsy and speckled with small drawings, The Museum of Whales provides a much-needed detour to a place most of us won’t ever get to see.” —Newsweek

“Lyrical and offbeat . . . Greene is adept at extrapolating meaning from oddities and a sense of wonder from the family histories contained within the walls of small museums. . . . What Greene’s book achieves most of all is revealing the passions and the obsessions of the people behind the museums we so love to visit.” —The New York Times

“This lyrical book is half travel guide, half inquiry into the joy of collecting—and a true original.” ―Dan Kois, Slate

“Delightful . . . Fascinating . . . Dreamy and disorienting in the best way . . . Greene is a deft and skillful writer. . . . [She] makes for a charming guide, a literary traveler in the spirit of Bruce Chatwin.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An engaging travelogue . . . A museum of museums . . . A provocation to reflect upon the essential nature of the museum, an inquiry that feels exceptionally pertinent as museums around the world try to define what they do in this moment of isolation . . . Greene’s enthusiastic prose would guide any visitors to Iceland well.” —The Dallas Morning News

“As much a fanciful literary experiment as a sober-minded overview of the Icelandic museum scene. Its delightful eccentricities . . . deliver a ton of solid information on Icelandic history and the Icelandic spirit. . . . Greene’s heady, lyrical, elliptical prose digs deep into the human urge to collect things. The book also delivers deep formal pleasures.” —The Boston Globe

“Delightful . . . Exuberant, idiosyncratic . . . With each chapter Greene circles around her subject as if viewing it in a vitrine, approaching it from different angles, changing her register and voice. The book is shot through with glee and irreverence.” ―The Guardian

“Captures the magical charm of this wild, idiosyncratic country.” ―Financial Times

“Wonderfully quirky.” ―The Sunday Telegraph

“A scavenger hunt for the peculiar.” ―Smithsonian Magazine

“Is this not the most gorgeous title of a book ever? . . . A delight for sentence-obsessed nerds like me. The writing is colorful, funny, precise, at times journalistic and at times whimsical and wandering, but always surprising and generous. This book will transport you, making you feel like Alice in Wonderland. . . . Each chapter is its own delicious story. . . . Greene cracks open and lays bare an Icelandic treasure trove for the world to savor. . . . When I came across this book I needed to have it.” —Jessica Lind Peterson, The Rumpus

“Wide-reaching and rich . . . Greene guides us . . . with persistent and contagious curiosity . . . [and] vivid and precise descriptions. . . . [The drawings] lend an additionally magical quality. . . . An eye-opening introduction to the rich and sometimes quirky culture of this island nation.” ―Athenaeum Review

“A rollicking trip through [Iceland’s] museums filled with the mythic, the marvelous, and the eccentric . . . Greene is a splendid guide with a playful voice—imagine Hermes writing with whimsy and charm—and . . . reveal[s] the extraordinary in the ordinary. This amusing, searching collection of essays, threaded with Greene’s rangy curiosity, is an ode to the joys and rewards of paying attention.” —Garnette Cadogan, Lit Hub

“Not only incredibly fascinating, it’s also a beautiful book, perfect for gifting to loved ones. . . . [It] was instantly a hit with me. . . . It’s going to be one I tell all my friends and family about.” ―Cassie Gutman, Book Riot

“Tremendously engaging . . . A thoroughly surprising book on a completely unexpected topic that will fill readers with joyful literary appreciation . . . Greene [is] a creative and eloquent twenty-first-century cultural explorer. . . . With an ear for stories and an eye for delight, [she] has crafted a chronicle that shines with wit and warms with compassion. . . . A gleaming gem of intelligent writing and an exuberant travelogue.” —Booklist, starred review

“A delightful one-of-a-kind journey . . . Insightful . . . Greene turns what easily could have become a mere cabinet of curiosities into a thoughtful and complex work. . . . Almost as hard to classify as it would be not to enjoy, Greene’s expertly assembled blend of travel writing, history, museum studies, and memoir proves as memorable as any museum exhibition.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
“A beguiling and witty assessment of a country’s obsessive urge to curate . . . There’s an air of Italo Calvino’s fantastical Invisible Cities wafting its way throughout.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A poetic look at the country’s museums.” —Library Journal

“An enjoyable journey with an eloquent guide . . . Like the museums she visits, Greene transforms her collection of facts, anecdotes and ideas into something more. She intelligently invents something new, something fresh, something easier to carry yet full of meaning and insight. . . . Her infectious curiosity and rhythmic writing carry you along. It's like traveling with your most erudite friend. . . . The reader is rewarded with a trip to remember.” ―BookBrowse

“A joy to read. A. Kendra Greene has found a fascinating mode of storytelling. . . . The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is an engaging collection that was undoubtedly more interesting than any museum I have ever been to—it is like a museum of museums. . . . A love letter to the Icelandic culture, and the fleeting nature of its many stories.” —Devyn Carmen, Superstition Review

“Greene . . . is a gifted tour guide.” ―Ventura County Reporter

“So damn good . . . with a dry humor, a brisk intelligence, and carefully curated prose.” —Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub

“Celebrates the obsession that keeps these whimsical collections going, along the way revealing plenty about a land of myth and geological marvel. If the book’s title strikes a plangent note now that so many of our own museums are imperilled, it only deepens the appeal of this quirky quest.” —The Observer

“Delightful . . . Arch and whimsical, and full of jaunty assertions . . . There is something of the extended poem about this book.” ―Sara Wheeler, The Spectator (Australia)

“Delightfully strange, beautifully written . . . Wise and whimsical, this is a lovely celebration of curiosity, folklore and nature and the obsessive spirit of the souls who wanted to share their wonder with others.” —The Simple Things

“A masterpiece. By way of exploring the many humble, arguably eccentric museums of Iceland, Greene gives us a portrait of humanity that is quietly, cumulatively thrilling, as startling in its many revelations as the collections and collectors she portrays. Greene is the best kind of guide: funny, probing, generous of mind and heart, fully alive to the essential human yearning expressed in these miraculous little museums. Read this book. You will be happier, and richer in spirit, for it.” —Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

“Greene’s voice is probing and hilarious; her sentences are vivacious and wild. This is the gold standard by which all future essays about Icelandic penis museums will be measured.” —Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses
 
“So attentive and meticulous and compassionate a voice, a touch, that every light and feathery (avian, human) thing here gathered—into this curatorial piece about our curatorial passions, about having, naming, meaning—seems pristine in all its qualities, unaltered in the handling, in the open palm presenting it. Greene knows to hold it out a bit, away from her, into the cold Icelandic air, to let the subtler meanings of the thing escape the thing, extend the taxonomic thing beyond itself.” —David Searcy, author of Shame and Wonder
 
“Like a dream both feverish and freezing, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See works on the reader elementally. As the sentences unspool their disarming lyricism, carrying with them the flotsam and jetsam of strange fact and stranger interpretation, Greene allows delight to converse with revulsion, incantation with nightmare, tradition with oddity.” —Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Preparing the Ghost
 
“Kendra Greene has brought together so much of what makes good storytelling: the compelling and untrammeled subject of museums, the dark mystery of human motivation, and the eviction of the quiet, unbidden black island we call Iceland. This is a book that opens a pathway into the depth and variegated distances of the human heart, enriching the experience we call: to be alive.” —Kurt Caswell, author of Getting to Grey Owl

“A delightful, lyrical tribute to those who gather, record, and preserve. This is a book brought to life by its own subject matter: by curiosity, obsession, and the desire to share with others our own sense of wonder.” —Malachy Tallack, author of The Un-Discovered Islands

“Kendra Greene understands that a museum can itself be an obsessive work of art, the long fuse of a fever dream that must be shared. And share she does, her wit and deep curiosity casting sparks across every page.” —Philip Graham, author of The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

“The setting may be Iceland, but Greene’s brilliant prose—by turns funny and powerfully poetic—explores a much more universal human instinct to collect and save. This is a book about our imagination’s ability to see what is not there—to pull mythic tales from real things and to find truth in our missing pieces. A beautiful, buoyant read.” —Christine Coulson, author of Metropolitan Stories

Library Journal

05/01/2020

Not so much a guidebook as a meditation on how museums develop, this book from writer/artist Greene explores the social and cultural history of the people and country of Iceland. It is a tribute to museums of an island nation with only 333,000 people but more than 265 museums. How does a seemingly random assortment of objects map a people's past and future? From the Icelandic Phallological Museum to the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft, most museums in Iceland were established in the past 20 years, coinciding with the increased interest in tourism. The author considers how collections by themselves are just groups of things, and how a collection becomes a museum when it is arranged into a story. VERDICT For travelers and those interested in museums, collecting, Icelandic history and culture, and a poetic look at the country's museums.—Susan Belsky, Oshkosh P.L., WI

JUNE 2020 - AudioFile

A. Kendra Greene’s love for Iceland, its hundreds of quirky museums and private collections, and the people behind these diverse institutions is obvious in her delightful narration of this unusual travel book. Greene’s voice is rich and expressive, and she rolls through the Icelandic words with authenticity. (She thanks her language coach in the acknowledgments.) Her curiosity and enthusiasm are contagious, and the listener is swept along a magical landscape. Greene is impressed and amused by the world’s only phallological museum; a sorcery and witchcraft museum that features necropants, pants made from skin; and collections dedicated to the herring that no longer come to Iceland, stones collected by a factory worker on her daily hikes, and other assortments of objects that don’t seem to have a theme at all. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-02-17
A quirky, personal travel guide to some of the offbeat sites that Iceland has to offer.

Greene, who has worked at several museums, joyfully recounts her experiences in Iceland, a country of 330,000 people, visiting 28 of their 265 museums, most “established in the last twenty years.” In this debut memoir, the author writes that she’s never “known a place where the boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.” Some, in fact, don’t exist—e.g., the title museum. There’s an air of Italo Calvino’s fantastical Invisible Cities wafting its way throughout, as Greene guides us with childlike wonder through such museums as “Sverrir Hermannsson’s Sundry Collection,” the “Herring Era Museum,” “The Museum of Prophecies,” and the “Icelandic Sea Monster Museum.” First up is the Icelandic Phallological Museum, a “kind of mammal-phallus Noah’s Ark,” where visitors can gaze upon penises of duck, ocean perch, polar bears, and other domestic and foreign animals. On one wall there’s a “lovely installation,” Our Silver Boys, which the author describes as “fifteen silver casts representing the Icelandic national handball team, stood upright like thriving mushrooms.” Petra’s Stone Collection, picked by herself and family members near their home, is outside, for all to see. Greene’s story is not just about the museums, but also about the people who create their individualistic collections and their families, who often keep them and a small cafe or gift shop going. Greene tantalizes us with a visit to the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, formerly a hardware store, curated by Siggi, or the Sorcerer, which displays whips, life-size facsimiles of outlandish Icelandic necropants (pants made from a dead man’s skin) and 11 installations. “Ten,” Greene writes, “if you fail to count the invisible boy.”

A beguiling and witty assessment of a country’s obsessive urge to curate.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177110301
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Arrival  

Lilja collects me from the airport bus under a gray morning sky and, swinging my bag into her little silver car, asks if I got her message not to worry about the volcano. Because you shouldn’t, and it won’t affect your trip, and these things happen all the time.

The whole trans-Atlantic approach from Boston to Reykjavík takes less than five hours, which is scarcely time enough to fall asleep or start a third in-flight movie or convince yourself of the proper pronunciation of every unfamiliar letter in the Icelandic alphabet—eth and thorn, especially—but it is apparently long enough to board an airplane and cross half an ocean without having any idea you are aimed straight at a sudden increase in seismic activity.

Not that it should be surprising. Just the 45 minutes from the international airport to the bus terminal downtown is a misty drive through old lava fields and venting hot springs, a gradual accumulation of houses and buildings tracing the ocean’s edge of an island straddling two tectonic plates: an island that rose up from these waters in the first place precisely because of those plates, their penchant to slip and grind and spill their molten heart.

She says, Don’t worry about the volcano, and in the same breath begins to describe the possibility of ash clouds and gas masks and helicopters plucking hikers from the mountains because there’s no better way to alert them that they may be in mortal peril.

Lilja pulls up the national weather service’s website, teaches me to toggle from the outline of Iceland annotated with the forecast of rain, to the one predicting the visibility of the northern lights, to the dots and stars mapping a string of tiny earthquakes, every shift and shock detected for the last 72 hours. Mostly, on the map, they register not much more than a Richter Scale’s 3.0. I grew up along another shoreline, in California, and the freckling map prompts a certain kind of nostalgia, a tenderness for these almost imperceptible events.

I am to keep vigil, she says. I am to refresh and refresh and refresh the map. It doesn’t matter that they are tiny, doesn’t matter that they are all but obscure. I am to watch whether the number of tremors waxes or wanes. I am to notice how their alignment is not random—every one of them a sign. I am to witness: Their accumulation in fact articulates the frontiers of fault line and fissure we cannot otherwise see. It describes those underpinnings shaping everything else. And, though we may tremble, it points us ever toward what may just happen next.

The ridgelines here are black rock or lupine-laced, perhaps dotted with sheep, if not dusted with snow. Where there is shoreline enough I pick up sea glass and shards of china, walk past feathers and sometimes bones. I have come, I think it is right to say, because of the borders of this place. Because not just here but always: Something happens at the edges.

I have come for the perimeter of territory staked out under the name museum. Because, for all the museums I have worked for or volunteered at or interned with, for all the continents where I have been the museum visitor, I have never known a place where the boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.

So maybe don’t make plans until we know if the lava is melting the glacial ice, if the flood of all that water unbound will close the northern roads or the southern roads or, who knows—it’s happened—both.

They say that if you’re baptized wrong, if the holy water does not wash over your eye, you may retain another sight, may see the elves even when they do not choose to reveal themselves to you.

And I feel something of that old story here, that I have been given a glimpse of something extraordinary, hidden though it was there the whole time, interwoven amidst everything else we see or know or put in our pockets or hold in our hands.

Some time later, in the calm of a museum café, I will be chatting with a family visiting from my homeland, and I will tell them how the local museum studies professor puts the count at 265 museums and public collections in this country of 330,000 people—how that alone would be astonishing—but remember almost all these places have been established in the last twenty years, like seeds dormant forever and then triggered at last by some great fire, some sharp snap of frost, to finally take root and bloom.

Amazing, they agree, though they sit there in the museum café, sipping their coffees, never leaving the antechamber for the exhibits within. Outside, the mist collects and recedes, gathers up and blows through, the world beyond the museum’s glass wall always there but veiled, disintegrating, fading in and out of perception’s reach.

And anyway it doesn’t have to flood; it could spew ash. Maybe the crops die, maybe the sheep are poisoned, maybe you breathe through a washcloth and famine sparks the French Revolution.

These are old forces. The magma, and the tremors. The famine and the want. The way we love the pieces of this painfully, gloriously physical world but also the way we survive it because of the stories we fashion from its shards. We love rocks and birds and old boats and brass rings. But it’s the stories. The stories are something else. We do not just keep and collect things, amass and restore them. We trouble ourselves to repurpose, create, and invent things that can carry, a little easier, those stories we cannot live without. We love enchantments and mysteries and monsters and ghosts. We love the woman on the cusp of transformation searching for her sealskin so she can return home, become again what she was before. This is what we have always held onto. This is how we lash ourselves to the mast. These are old forces—irresistible—shaping the world anew.

The Museum of Something Mumbled  

There was famine. And the family determined they could save one son by sending him away. Or maybe, with one less mouth to feed, they determined they could save themselves. So they arranged for his passage to North America, a very long time on a ship. As the sailing date drew near, the boy was sick, too sick to journey—but everything was arranged and someone had to go, so they sent a different son, even younger, in his place.
           
Relatives in North America dutifully met the ship, but when they could not find the name of the first son on the manifest, could not find the boy they had come for and did not know to look for another, they went home again, empty-handed. It did not matter when they learned of the substitution, if they learned of the substitution. No one heard from the boy who had been sent on the ship. No one was found who claimed they had seen him. No one could determine where the lost boy had died.
           
Only he wasn’t dead. More than a decade after that first ship had docked, he stepped off another, returning home to Iceland, intent to find a bride. In all that time he’d never written. In all that time he’d never sent word. He had scarcely more to say in the flesh: something curt and mumbled about the native people, that they should be treated better, but no further accounting of his survival, of how that starving child became a man, standing here in a buffalo coat.

I myself know nothing more of him, of his story, would not know even this except for the buffalo coat, sequestered here in a glass case as if it had stepped into a phone booth to make a call. And even this, what little I know, feels misplaced, though it turns like a key in a lock.

It feels like a story not meant for me, in part, because it hardly feels on display. It’s not in the main museum but in an entry building, in a kind of hallway before temporary exhibits, at the far edge of the museum café. The coat has been given a footprint of text in its case, everything properly printed and kerned. It is a text shorter even than the story I tell here, the words in Icelandic but not echoed in another tongue, not a one of the other languages of the people who knew this man, knew the lost boy long enough for his shoulders to fill out this coat. I assume the text, too, says something curt and mumbled.

This is the story I was given though I came looking for a reverend, after I was shown that man’s frock and shoes. This is the story I was given after I kept asking about a different boat: the old fishing boat docked in sod and rotting on the museum lawn, never quite enough money to maintain it, now too dangerous to climb aboard, though everyone who grew up here used to clamber about its planks and railings as a child.

I keep this stray gem as one does any precious thing. I have the sense to hold close this story I did not come for, could not have asked for. I see the windfall immediately. This is the story I was given only after I was given the grand tour, after I was invited to rest in the museum café, after I thought my questions were answered, after I was given coffee and given cake, until I could eat no more.

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