Iceland is bursting with cabinets of curiosities

Competition is stiff among museums in Iceland. The Phallological Museum in Húsavík, devoted to the penis, stands tall in a crowded field: 265 museums and public collections operate in a country of 330,000 — a population, incidentally, with the highest literacy rate in the world.

A. Kendra Greene, an American writer and artist, has worked in a number of museums, and her affection for them is touching. Indeed, it is the blurred edge between a few shelves in a front room and a civic institution that originally drew her to northern latitudes. She writes of Iceland:

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.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is structured around eight ‘cabinets’, each containing a ‘gallery’. The galleries, introduced by a short reflection, mostly tell the detailed story of one museum, though over the course of the book they add up to a personal portrait of the country.

We learn much about Iceland from these pages. Public honesty means that a bicycle never needs to be locked; 1,500 pairs of Eurasian wigeon paddle on one northern lake; and isolation has resulted in a unique ecology. Wisely, Greene touches only briefly on the economic cycle: 1,000 years of bare feet and turf huts (as she puts it), then a boom, followed by the infamous banking collapse of 2009.

Her main interest is in stories, and in particular the stories of the museums’ foundations. The book’s title refers, somewhat obliquely, to her belief that it doesn’t matter if you don’t see something, as long as you think about concepts, myths and ideas that exist in the imagination.