Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

We have two articles on Auður Ava´s works. The first by Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir covers Auður´s first three novels and first book of poetry, up to and including the year 2011. The second by Þórunn Hrefna covers the later work up to and including the year 2024. For Úlfhildur´s article, read on below. Þórunn´s article follows it below, or you can click here to go straight to it.

“After four laps, the cravings had turned into painful hunger pains, so I decided to go home by myself and have some skyr and a glass of milk. If I had decided to do three more laps, you would have been born on the city’s frozen pond.”
(Butterflies in November)

The earth’s vegetation

In Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s 2007 novel The Greenhouse, a child is conceived in a greenhouse. It is Auður’s third novel, but in her first novel, Elevated Ground (1998), a child is conceived in a rhubarb patch. In The Greenhouse, the child appears to be a symbol for the earth’s vegetation—either that or the earth’s vegetation symbolises the child. In fact, all of Auður’s three novels are about children and their interactions with their guardians, who are not necessarily their parents. Thus, interactions with both children and vegetation can be seen as one of the major themes of her fiction, but beyond that her books all generally revolve around communication and self-expression. Thus, Ágústína, the protagonist of Elevated Ground, struggles to express herself in a way that her teachers find acceptable, while in Butterflies in November (2004), Auður’s second novel, a woman takes a trip with a deaf child. Furthermore, in The Greenhouse protagonist Arnljótur settles in a small village where he must learn an almost extinct language. He also befriends a polyglot monk during his stay.

As Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir touts a second career as an art historian, it should come as no surprise that her novels tackle communication and self-expression. Art itself is rarely an overriding theme in Auður’s work. Instead, her background is evident in how she approaches her subjects and how she addresses the common dilemmas that lie behind all artistic self-expression. In her work, she looks at the many questions that relate to the difficulties and infinite variations of such self-expression, while also questioning the set rules of how one interacts with one’s environment and fellow human beings—whether or not those rules serve to force such interactions along a premeditated course.

Aside from her three novels, Auður has published one book of poetry: Hymn on Glimmer (2010). The book actually contains a single, long-form poem that narrates a journey—or exile—on par with the days of the Icelandic outlaws. As the poem’s narrator explains in the latter half of the book, while sheltering in a cave with her partner:

dear Icelanders near and far
me and my lover have found shelter in a cave
it’s a two-room cave
with ice flower panelling
near a dead
mountain troll

The poetry is marked by its oracle-like narration and is filled with references that pull the reader in so many different directions that at times it can be challenging to deduce the poet’s intentions. In a way, the poem is addressing Iceland’s folklore and literature; the country’s cultural heritage. This can clearly be seen in the following passage:

it might not be obvious to look at me
wearing glimmer skies on my eyelids
to commemorate the occasion
how deep my roots go
in a frozen-to-the-bone churchyard
north of the mountains
from the dust it emerges
that my ancestor
was an infamous good-time gal
(islendingabok.is)
who sailed to the island
across the depths of the ocean
in the sea-merchants’ final boat
over the white tide of time
and married a priest prone to premonitions
who seized
a fumbling hand from the
muddy surf
madelaine stood for hours by the breaking waves and
spoke in a foreign tongue to the dead fish who washed ashore
such was the power of her words
together they made an eloquent wolfish son who
translated a few sonnets by louise labé

The momentum here reminds one of the stream of consciousness writing associated with the modernists, where the mind is allowed to roam free and form a multitude of unexpected connections.

Within art history as well as the visual arts, there is an ongoing debate concerning the contradictions of putting responses to images or visual experiences into words. (We will not be delving any further into the complex idea of whether art is actually limited to a visual experience in this article.) To some extent at least, creating a visual artwork is an attempt to capture a sensation, experience or self-expression that cannot be put into words. If so, how can you expect to appraise, describe or critique the artwork, whether verbally or in writing? This discussion has incorporated various theories and word games concerning the interplay of words and images, which have given on to some very fruitful and important debates within academia and the artworld itself (viz-a-viz art not being limited to images). Auður has herself written an article on this matter, which is titled: “If I was a picture, how would you phrase me? The intersection of imagery and language as seen by the interpretive processes of art history” and can be found in Ritið 1/2005. Her discussion considers the effect that language has on images—or whether it has an effect at all. This is then applied to construct an argument about how everything plays a part in shaping the viewing experience; e.g. the museum or gallery itself as well as gallery programs and titles (i.e. “untitled” is in fact a title and reflects on the artwork, just like any other official title would). This all involves a level of skill in what is called “image-reading”—a skill which has by and large not been considered nearly as important as being able to read and comprehend written or oral language.

What makes Auður’s fiction so interesting is that she uses it to approach this subject from an entirely new angle. In her novels, there is a type of exploration of how visual arts as well as art history affect and intersect with written language; especially poetic language. Here, we are obviously returning to the previously referenced themes of communication and self-expression found in her books, but the wealth of imagery in Auður’s prose further magnifies the interplay of these two art fields. One might consider Auður’s prose a form of visual reading, and The Greenhouse in particular calls out for an illustrated reprint. In this way, Auður’s novels seem to exist at the intersection of visual art, art history and written language and in fact offer a powerful antithesis to the point of view commonly found within the art world which claims that any description of a work of visual art will inherently suffer from limitations.

“Transforming images into words”

Even though the setting in Elevated Ground is rather familiar—an Icelandic fishing village resting below a mountain—it is also a little fantastical, as the island that the village is located on seems to be rather smaller than Iceland. The time period is also rather vague. Though the story contains some modern elements there is a sensation of timelessness throughout, which resembles the nebulous past usually found in fairy tales. In the village, there is a teenaged girl named Ágústína, who lives with her aunt, Nína, because her mother is a scientist who travels all over the world to research bird migrations. Still, her mother regularly sends Ágústína letters from foreign parts, which add to the story’s sense of adventure. Ágústína is disabled: her feet are almost useless, and she has to use crutches to move around. However, her arms and hands are strong, and she uses them to play the oboe, shoot birds, swim, row and especially to plant vegetables, flowers and trees in her garden. Her dream is to scale the mountain that towers over the village, and she does so at the end of the book.

Whether it is due to her absent, foreign father or some other element, Ágústína is very different from the other townspeople. Her experience of the world differs from others, as can be seen in the trouble she has with her teacher, who says: “I have to say that overall Ágústína’s approach to her assignments at school is rather odd. She starts at their edge, so to speak, and from there she drifts into unrelated subjects and loses the thread. God knows how she thinks or reasons. Her mind seems to be all over the place, all at once.” Nína answers: “She can be a bit of a dreamer sometimes, my Ágústína” (78). Earlier in the book, there is a description of how the girl experiences her surroundings:

At a young age, she became aware of her special place in the world. Not just on account of her legs, but also because of the constant barrage of pictures that piled up inside her head, or did so until she started organising them, turning them into words that she used to build great towers. Thus, picture mountains turned into word mountains, layer by layer. The bottom layers had the most words, so that the tower wouldn’t collapse. The bottom layers of the word mountains were like the bottom layers of Nína’s tarts; they needed more stuffing, more canned fruit and chocolate chips and more cream than the rest. (22)

Here, the process of pictures turning into words and vice versa becomes clearly visible, with the prose also exploring different sensory experiences. It is not just words that are treated thusly by Ágústína, but numbers also:

How she interacts with numbers is not normal. [...] When she writes down numbers, she stacks them and turns them this way and that, creating all sorts of intricate patterns. A kind of three-dimensional web of numbers, with a backside to it and shadows, like asteroids that she can advance on from different directions. She doesn’t seem to comprehend that numbers and calculations only have one side. (79-80)

Still, Nína does not take much heed of the teacher’s comments. Overall, little attention is paid to such practical problems, even though Ágústína and her aunt are obviously rather poor and live in a leaky house. The sense of adventure pushes such real life concerns out of the way. Still, the story stays grounded through everyday household tasks, such as making jam or preparing traditional Icelandic food stuff.

Recipes

Food preparations play an important role in Butterflies in November, which includes a small book of recipes. In the novel, a recently divorced woman decides to make some changes in her life—putting her lover on hold and taking a trip. Her unexpected windfalls from a lotto and a raffle certainly come in handy for this plan, and after a strange sequence of events that starts with her heavily-pregnant friend slipping on ice, the protagonist is suddenly on the road in the middle of winter with her friend’s deaf son in the backseat of the car. On their journey, which spans the majority of the book, they encounter all kinds of adventures. It rains for most of the trip. Before their eyes, Iceland is draped in rain and fog, which is very different from the image of unspoilt natural beauty so often alluded to in Icelandic travel writing, and especially in Icelandic cinema: “While it rains, the landscape fades, the horizon replaced with fuzzy landmarks. In fact, the whole country is nothing but wasteland, once you’ve found your way out of the city, black sands, black lava, the black sea nearby and black skies above.” (102) Subversions of this kind are a good example of Auður’s unique approach to the traditional subject matters of Icelandic literature. Although it does not take place in Iceland, The Greenhouse offers a similar scene when Arnljótur is travelling in Southern Europe, driving through forests that seem endless: “the colour spectrum from green to green” (71).

Auður uses this greyness to play up the theme of Icelandic folktales; e.g. when the boy needs to pee while they are driving through the mountains and the protagonist decides to relieve herself as well. Wanting to find some shelter in the fog, she leads the boy towards a cairn. Despite their efforts, the cairn doesn’t seem to be getting any nearer, and they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a fox hunt: “Men wearing green terrorist outfits and brandishing shotguns jump out of the moss, the only animal that kills its own, they point their guns at us, surrounding me and the boy.” (107) However, once the men have put down their weapons they turn out to be rather friendly and even fix a flat tire on the twosome’s car. Later, she receives assistance from another man who also appears suddenly from the fog. This one claims to be a fairy but turns out to be human. He also knows sign language and can communicate with the boy.

Interactions with men form a major theme of the novel, but the main focus is the woman’s interactions with her friend’s deaf son, Tumi. He speaks sign language, but is also able to read and write, even though he is only four years old. To begin with, understanding the child is easy; e.g. in the supermarket where he simply points at what he wants, and the protagonist obeys. However, communications within the car are more complex:

Raising my voice in the front seat is useless, he can’t hear me, every time we need to talk I turn my indicator on and stop on the side of the road, turn around in my seat so he can see my lips moving and forming sound, my mouth opening and closing. (104)

Such scenes of communication and misunderstandings are continually inserted into the prose in short but effective interjections:

He means to speak softly once he’s in the bag, wants to whisper confidentially, but the voice is hollow and loud, even though he tries as best he can. His palm is too small to grasp the words of all the world’s messages. Still, I have three books on understanding deaf children in the car. I just need to find a convenient time to read them. (118)

It is to be expected that the protagonist considers their communication problems something that she’ll be able to read up on and overcome, as she is a polyglot and works as a proof-reader and translator in eleven different languages. In this case, however, it turns out that books are of little help, and communicating with the boy is something she needs to learn gradually while the two of them forge a connection.

“Mute in the mud”

Interactions between children and adults are again at the forefront in The Greenhouse, where a young father has to suddenly get to know his daughter, who was conceived purely by accident in a greenhouse. Arnljótur has inherited his mother’s interest in vegetation and gardening. As he has limited ideas about what he wants to do with his life, he decides to volunteer to work in a renowned rose garden whose history reaches all the way back to the Middle Ages. To get there, he heads off on a long journey through Southern Europe, which begins with him having to undergo surgery for a burst appendix. With him, he carries cuttings from a particular species of rose, red-violet in colour and with eight petals. The rose garden is located in a monastery in a small village. There, Arnljótur meets a monk named Tómas who speaks nineteen languages fluently and several more to various degrees. Then, the young man suddenly receives a phone call, informing him that the mother of his daughter is struggling with her academic work and needs to leave the child with its father for a while. The latter half of the novel describes how Arnljótur gets to know his daughter, Flóra Sól, and her mother, Anna. This unusual family concoction is reflected in the many other strange families that appear in Auður’s novels. In Elevated Ground, Ágústína does not know her father, nor does her mother, and the girl is raised by her mother’s sister. At the end of the novel, she receives news that her mother has had a son in a distant land with another man. In Butterflies in November, the young Tumi to some extent replaces the boy that the protagonist gave birth to and gave up for adoption when she was a teenager. At the book’s conclusion she decides to take Tumi with her on more trips. Tumi does not know his father, and his mother is busy taking care of her new born twins, fathered by another man who is also nowhere near. In The Greenhouse, Arnljótur lives with his father after his mother dies in a car accident. His twin brother is mentally challenged and lives in a group home, and the two brothers are as different as can be. Thus, a colourful pattern of familial relations is formed, not unlike the cohabitation of different plants within the same garden.

The Greenhouse is Auður Ava’s most concise novel. Her previous books tend to pull in different directions, but in The Greenhouse, everything is in its place. It is tempting to make metaphorical use of the novel’s sections on gardening, where “the first week is spent pulling weeds and snipping my way through the dens rose shrubberies” (140). Later, the narrator is “constantly discovering new species of roses within the wilderness, tree roses, shrub roses, climbing roses and creeping roses, dwarf roses and wild roses, clusters of roses and large single flowers on long stems, different shapes, scents and colours” (141). In the same way, the reader is pulled into this lush novel, which also serves as an axis between the two previous books. As I said before, there is a theme of communication evident in all three novels; both general communication as well as communication specifically between an adult and a child. These interactions are often bound up with ideas about disabilities and special needs—things that the unusual family units in Auður’s novels all have in common. In The Greenhouse, the presence of a “higher power” is given more weight. In the two previous novels, the supernatural is merely a background theme. In Elevated Ground, Ágústína is religious and hopes that God will perform a miracle on her, and although religion is not at the forefront in Butterflies in November, the protagonist at one point purchases a small model of a church which she glues to the dashboard of the car. However, Butterflies in November also offers different concepts of higher power; e.g. at the beginning of the book when the protagonist visits a medium who predicts the major events of the novel—a foreshadowing that calls back to the dream premonitions of the Icelandic Sagas. Dreams are also important in The Greenhouse, where religion obviously also plays an important role—especially as the rose garden is located inside a monastery. In addition, art has some significance, as when Arnljótur visits a church in the village and discovers a painting of Mary holding the Baby Jesus which bears a striking semblance to his daughter.

In this way, art plays a significant role while also being intrinsically connected to religion. Art is not seen as a neutral factor, no more than vegetation, but has a life of its own. This becomes ever more evident as the story progresses, when art is used to reflect on memories and imagination, as in the description of the scene of the accident that killed Arnljótur’s mother:

I stop before approaching mom, who is inside the flipped car in the lava basin.  I take an inordinately long time to look at the surrounding nature, circle the area for a while, like a cinematographer using a boom camera to get an aerial shot of the scene, before zooming in on mom, the leading actress that everything revolves around. The date is the seventh of August and I decide that fall has come early. That’s why there are so many red and flame-yellow colours everywhere, I imagine infinite variations of red at the scene of the accident: rust-red berry bushes, blood-red sky, violet-red leaves on a few nearby shrubs, golden moss. Mom was dressed in a burgundy cardigan, the coagulated blood was invisible until Dad rinsed the sweater in our bath tub. By lingering over the minor details of the scene, like how you begin by inspecting a painting’s background before considering its actual subject matter, I delay mom’s final departure [...]. (21)

Arnljótur was not actually present at the scene, so the picture he draws is his own creation—as is made evident by how he “decides” that fall has come early. Here, we can also see how Arnljótur systematically makes use of vegetation, both directly and metaphorically, throughout the whole novel; from his staging of his mother’s death at the start of the journey to the green colours of his trip through Southern Europe—which ends in the famous rose garden that needs to have its colour scheme tended to. Vegetation becomes a self-expression that grows and extends beyond language and muteness, but vegetation and gardening are also the tools that Ágústína makes use of to express herself and gain control of her life. These motifs of vegetation and gardening keep the novels grounded, but they also at various times serve to set the scene and take the form of emotion, celebration and, last but not least, maturity.

© Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, 2011

Author Discussing Text, Text Discussing Author

In the 2011 article “Gróður jarðar” (“Growth of the Soil”), published here on The Literature Web, Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir provides an overview of the works of Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir to that date. Since then, Auður Ava has written six novels, which will be discussed here. These are Undantekningin (The Exception 2012), Ör (Hotel Silence 2016), Ungfrú Ísland (Miss Iceland 2018), Dýralíf (Animal Life 2020), Eden (2022), and DJ Bambi (2023). Since 2011, Auður Ava has also written lyrics for a dance performance, and written and translated plays.

Auður Ava was awarded both the Icelandic Literary Prize and the Nordic Council Literary Prize for Hotel Silence, and a film with the same title, based on the novel and directed by Léa Pool, premiered earlier this year. She has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize for all six novels discussed here, and has been awarded a number of prizes abroad.

Certain themes are ubiquitous in these works, reappearing again and again. Central to them all are explorations of the nature of text, language and storytelling. The boundary between the author and her characters is often unclear, Auður Ava the author hiding away, as if she is only a go-between and the work is, in fact, written by one of her characters.

A defining theme in all of the works is the threat to humanity posed by its own abuse of the Earth; human driven climate change and catastrophic global warming. The end is nigh, if not literally, then at least the personal apocalypse of those who have too much suffering to contend with.

The Eternal Feminine

María, the protagonist of The Exception, sees her life turned completely upside down immediately on the book’s first page, when Flóki, her husband of eleven years, announces that he is leaving her for a man.

The narrative describes the first few weeks of María’s new life as she tries to bring order to the chaos while caring for her and Flóki’s children, two year old twins. And as if María’s life wasn´t complicated enough, her biological father also shows up and wants to meet her for the first time, and a child she and Flóki had decided to adopt is waiting to be collected.

María is, understandably, quite upset by all this. She appears to have kept her eyes firmly averted throughout her marriage, as it is slowly revealed that Flóki has cheated on her repeatedly, and his sexual orientation has been fairly obvious to everyone but her.

Life’s capacity to surprise us is one of the main themes of the novel, although it is revealed that María should probably have seen this coming. She gains a certain clarity with hindsight but other characters must often spoon feed her information. María is not a particularly observant woman, judging by everything her husband has been getting up to. Her mother also seems to have lived a double life without her noticing anything.

On the other hand, Perla, a little person and María’s downstairs neighbour, notices everything. She keeps a close eye on María and explains her nosiness by saying that as a writer, psychoanalyst, assistant to a crime writer, and marriage counselor, she must always keep her eyes peeled. Perla claims to need very little sleep and divides her 24 hour work day between counseling couples during the day and writing at night. Her past is certainly mysterious and her work life odd in many ways, but María has a very good friend in her.

Perla has been working as a ghost writer for an author of crime fiction but becomes ever more determined to start writing her own fiction as María’s story progresses. Perla seems to have observed María’s life more closely than María herself, and it is, in fact, heavily implied that María is her creation. This makes Perla the author, positioned at the heart of the novel. The theme of the metatext is recurring in Auður Ava’s works. These texts have sometimes been likened to a Greek chorus, positioned partially outside the story while addressing events within it, but none the less part of it.

The fact is that Perla lives largely by mooching off María. She comes by several times every day to borrow something, and more or less relies on María for food and drink. Could we not claim that authors mooch off their characters? If we want to avoid negative connotations, we could say that they let the characters “nourish” them. Perla claims to be afraid to start writing in case what she writes comes true on the floor above. She does, however, say that there is a little too much drama in María’s story.

Perla and María are repeatedly portrayed as author and character. For example, Perla repeatedly comments on María’s beauty. In fact, María is not only beautiful; she is a good mother, can all but jump her own height in stiletto heels, goes out into biting frost in a sleeveless silk gown, cooks complicated dishes without effort, does important aid work in war torn areas, and speaks several languages without an accent. She is admired wherever she goes. Can she be real? Is it any wonder that Perla allows herself to marvel at her own creation? She has managed to create a character who is the embodiment of perfect femininity, the feminine archetype herself; “Das Ewige Weibliche”, as Perla proudly words it.

Auður Ava often creates these transcendent female characters who are extremely beautiful and smart, and respected and admired by all except maybe those they love. They are untouchable feminine icons, resembling fairytale characters or divine beings. Furthermore, the circumstances of the twins’ conception imply that María is a very fitting name indeed.

Towards the end of The Exception, Perla contemplates how to end her novel. Her character is on the way home with her child – a child she is adopting from a war-torn country, and who brings new hope. Perla’s last words are that the manuscript is on its way to the printers.

Personal and Universal Suffering

Like The Exception’s María, Jónas Ebeneser, the protagonist of Hotel Silence, has his world turned upside down at the start of the narrative. Not only does his marriage collapse, but his wife claims that he is, in fact, not the father of Guðrún Vatnalilja, their only daughter. Jónas feels that there is no longer any point in living and decides to take his own life. But even though he can turn his hand to almost anything, the logistics of suicide defeat him. He gets stuck contemplating different methods and can’t make up his mind. He worries that Vatnalilja might be the one to find his body and decides to go abroad, to somewhere no-one knows him, and do it there. Jónas’ role in life has been to repair what is broken so he takes his toolbag with him. He is quiet but good with his hands, a type of male character we often come across in Auður Ava’s works.

Hotel Silence is first and foremost about suffering. In The Exception, María is an aid worker and understands that, in comparison to the pain she has witnessed in war-torn areas, a husband coming out is nothing, and her suffering barely worth registering. Jónas travels to a “small town shot to pieces” in a country which is not named in the story, but is one of the thousands of war-torn places of human history, where suffering pervades everything like a persistent nightmare. Like María’s, Jónas’ suffering seems small in comparison.

This comparison between personal and universal suffering is a major theme of the novel. We can compare the scars we all have, varied in size and number, but can we compare suffering? Jónas’ neighbour, Svanur, is one of the most important characters in the novel. In the first part of the narrative, he is eager for Jónas’ company but Jónas does not feel they are close and says that Svanur does monologues, not conversations. Svanur does not hear Jónas’ cries for help (and even agrees to loan him a gun when he is suicidal). Svanur also tries to ask for help but Jónas does not hear him, either. The two men mirror each other, are in fact in the same position, but can’t connect.

Svanur drops several hints but Jónas does not pick up on them. He feels like something is weighing on Svanur but does not try to discover what it might be. He does not recognize the “personal suffering” he is seeing. At the end of the narrative, Jónas is told that Svanur has taken his own life by drowning himself in the ocean.

We all have a scar left by our birth; the navel reminds us that suffering is woven into life itself. Jónas’s suffering does not, after all, seem laughable when compared to the pain of those who have survived the horrors of war. Ultimately, suffering is common to all of humanity and hard to quantify.

The Patriarchy Dictates a Woman’s Place

The war-torn country in Hotel Silence is not named and could exist in many parts of the world, and at any time in history. Humanity is constantly destroying the world and then fighting to rise from the ashes. Miss Iceland differs from the other five books discussed here, as it is set in a specific time and place. It takes place in 1963, mostly in Reykjavík. Famous artists of the time appear in the narrative and it references real events, both in Iceland and the wider world. Surtsey Island is being formed, Kennedy gets murdered.

Hekla Gottskálksdóttir moves to Reykjavík from the rural area Dalir. She is determined to become a writer but it is clear from the start that she faces an uphill battle due to her sex. On the bus to Reykjavík, she remembers a story of a woman from Breiðafjörður who had “delusions of being a poet” and was so malcontent that she ended up drowning herself. No good comes of women writing, they are not meant to have a voice. It is soon made clear what women should pursue instead, apart from motherhood. Hekla has no sooner stepped off the bus in Reykjavík than she is asked to take part in a beauty pageant by a man who is looking for “unattached maidens, sublimely endowed with both clean-limbedness and and comeliness” (35).

The patriarchy pushes women into specific roles and defines their place, for example via the male gaze, as discussed by Luce Irigaray. The man who wants to put Hekla on a pageant stage pursues her throughout the narrative despite her repeated rejections. Hekla is ogled and groped while working to make a living. She is paid less than her male colleagues, and setting money aside in order to pursue her dream is difficult for her. The male poet Hekla gets involved with constantly tries to persuade her to cook, and to shoehorn her into the role of the homemaker. It is the “reprobate” Jón John, Hekla’s friend, despised and degraded by the patriarchy, who lifts her up and supports her, first by giving her a space to write in and then by sending her a ticket abroad.

Auður Ava's main characters are often complemented by larger than life supporting characters and we see a few of those in Miss Iceland. They mirror Hekla the writer and show possible “frames” for her. Her best friend, Ísey, speaks in poetry and violently longs to write. However, she is married and a mother, and doesn’t feel able to explain her passion to her husband: “He also wouldn’t understand that sometimes I want to stop whatever I’m doing and write about it instead, to make it real” (80-81). Here, Ísey echoes the words of Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, who has said that experience alone is not enough for her. She must write about it to give it meaning.

Ísey, trapped in her home, enjoys visual art but is constantly reminded that her husband could sell the paintings. She reads and writes in secret, but her husband wants many children and Ísey knows that with each child she will have less time for herself. Both Ísey and Hekla love literature and art, and have a rich inner life despite how their lives are circumscribed. But Hekla, being unmarried and child-free, has a freedom that Ísey is denied.

A gay man’s position in the man’s world of the sixties is even worse than that of a woman writer. Jón John is forced to work as a seaman instead of designing and sewing costumes, which is his dream. He is assaulted because of his sexuality, and his life is literally in danger when working on the sea. Having been conceived by a soldier during the occupation of Iceland, Jón John is doubly marginalized and full of self-disgust. Jón John and Hekla find support in each other. He brings her clothes and books from abroad, including The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir.

Starkaður Hvergerðingur, usually referred to only as “the poet” in the book, hangs out at the famous Mokka kaffi and Laugavegur 11 with the other poets and talks about writing. However, he seems to have little in the way of inspiration, of which Ísey is rich, or work ethic, Hekla’s defining trait. While Hekla carefully divides her day into three parts – working, sleeping and writing – the poet is busy doing nothing and always sleeps until noon. The names of his brother poets – Ægir Skáldajökull, Daði Draumfjörð and Þórarinn Dragfjörð, all melodramatic and obviously contrived pen names – amuse the reader, as does their flattery of each other, their pretentiousness, and their vanity. The character Starkaður exemplifies what Hekla will never be, and does not want to be. She does not admire the Mokka-poets but simply longs to be able to both write and make a living. She is in need of both money and a room of her own.

His sex grants Starkaður the power of language, despite him not having much to say. This is highlighted when he and Hekla visit the poet’s mother. The mother slaves away, cooking and cleaning, and is never allowed to complete a sentence as her son finishes all her sentences for her. During this visit, Starkaður tries to put Hekla in her place by giving her a cookbook as a Christmas gift. Her father, on the other hand, gifts her a newly published collection of short stories by Ásta Sigurðardóttir. This is a reminder that women did write in sixties Iceland, also women whose writing was different, even though Hekla’s manuscript is rejected for being different from what the publisher usually handles.

Hekla refuses to yield despite an abundance of stories of women who defied the patriarchy and were destroyed, such as the woman poet who drowned herself. Symbolic of this is the female cat Óðinn, for whom Hekla chooses a name contradicting her sex, thus breaking the rules of both the patriarchy and language use. Óðinn, the god of poetry and wisdom, enjoys freedom both inside and outside the home. She gives birth under Hekla’s writing desk and generally flourishes, until Starkaður suddenly notifies Hekla of her death. She has been hit by a car and has already been buried. Soon after this, Hekla makes the decision to leave both Starkaður and the country.

Bloodfire Sky

Women who write are ever present in Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s narrative world. The main character in Animal Life is a fourth-generation midwife. Dómhildur is named for her late great aunt (who was also a midwife), lives in her apartment and mirrors her in most things. Dómhildur Sr, or great aunt Fífa, was constantly writing and Dómhildur Jr, or Dýja, is going through her numerous manuscripts and letters, stored in her apartment in a cardboard box formerly used for shipping bananas.

A storm is brewing and the atmosphere is sinister. Dýja’s sister is a meteorologist specializing in air mass motion in the upper atmosphere, and she is worried. Something is looming, and several extreme low pressure areas are expected to hit the country in a row.

Great aunt Fífa was truly an apocalyptic prophet and far ahead of her time in realizing what humanity is doing to the earth. Among the contents of the cardboard banana box are her texts contemplating the human animal, a species that has done irreversible damage to the world. The most substantial manuscript is titled Animal Life – an Exploration of What the Human Animal Is Capable Of.

Decades ago, Fífa was already writing newspaper articles on mass extinction, ocean plastic pollution, ocean acidification and mass extinction, deforestation, and the urgent need for bee conservation. Last but not least is a 25 years old article titled The Earth is Heating Up, where Fífa writes that soon, humanity will start to feel as if it is locked in “a boiling tin box” (72).

Fífa has independently reached the conclusion that Earth’s flora and fauna, and the world as a whole, will flourish without humanity, and possibly only without humanity. After all, there are many indications that humanity will be the shortest-lived species in Earth’s history.

Some of these articles have been published but not all. Dýja speaks to a journalist who tells her that towards the end of her life, Fífa had started repeating herself and sending in the same articles over again – either the same articles or very similar ones (!). The author of that author, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, also does not hesitate to repeat herself on this subject, and human driven climate change is woven like a burning tin thread into the fabric of many of her works.

Towards the end of her life, Fífa writes that she has “given up on language”, that the world has no need for more words. After this, more and more voids start appearing in her texts. The gaps between sentences and words get larger and larger, and letters start to drift apart. Dýja decides not to try to get her great aunt’s works published, deeming them too strange and eclectic. She also has difficulty determining the order of the manuscripts, until she realizes that each text is the last text. Dýja stops reading, tapes the box shut, and puts it into storage. But somehow, the text has still found its way to us, the readers – with a picture of a cardboard banana box on the cover.

While Dýja puts the box away, the sun is setting and “[T]he sky is bloodfire. In a moment, the world is a pool of ink” (189).

The world is ending. A pool of ink is what is left when everything that has been written  to try to save it dissolves. At the end of the narrative, an extreme storm hits the country. Language gives way; words and letters drift apart, and Animal Life ends with the same words as Fífa’s manuscript, The truth About Light. Words about a new Heaven and a new Earth, where a bird is heard singing.

Fífa gives up on language. Dýja puts away the box of manuscripts without trying to have them published. Author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir writes a book called Animal Life, ending in the dissolution of language, a kind of apocalypse which still brings a renewal of sort. The question we are left with is: Is there any point in wielding language and text against such overwhelming forces? With her writing, Auður Ava has answered in the affirmative.

“Is It Worth Trying to Do Something?”

Auður Ava’s three latest novels all have the same cover design. They are all completely white with a small image on the front cover that references the narrative. On the cover of Animal Life is the banana box containing Dómhildur’s texts, on the cover of Eden, a paradisical landscape reminiscent of The Watchtower, and on the cover of DJ Bambi, the image of a cup in Bing & Grondahl’s Seagull china pattern.

Eden continues some important themes from Animal Life, touching on climate change, global warming, ocean acidification, and other contemporary issues. Linguist Alba buys a derelict house on a plot of eroding land outside Reykjavík and starts a large vegetable garden despite foreboding in the air. Like in Animal Life, extreme weather looms.

The apocalyptic atmosphere in Animal Life is also present in Eden, along with strong religious themes. Lúther, a cab driver who gives Alba a copy of The Watchtower, a newsletter published by Jehova’s Witnesses, knows the art of interpreting signs and omens. He asks whether strange fogs, droughts, and mudslides caused by extreme rain, haven’t caught Alba’s attention. She agrees that they have, and the reader can add to the list a blood red sky and the mass death of migratory birds.

The image on the cover of Eden could easily have been taken from this issue of The Watchtower, which is titled “The End is Near – This Is What the Kingdom of God Looks Like”. Lúther points out to Alba an article titled “Is It Worth Trying to Do Something?” (179), a question which inevitably weighs on those contemplating the disastrous state of the climate. Here, author Auður Ava reiterates the answer she gave in Animal Life. Yes, it is worth it to do something, and it is important to use language and text to do it.

Alba is an expert on minority languages and attends a conference on endangered languages. She also focuses on healing the land. After all, plants grow across linguistic barriers and existed before the advent of language. She is asked whether she intends to grow apple trees, and rather thinks she will. After all, the global climate is about to change drastically.

All the signs presage an apocalypse but Alba doesn’t let that stop her from reclaiming the wasteland and teaching Icelandic to a refugee boy named Danyel. The language will survive for one more generation and there is a glimpse of hope. At the end of the narrative, Alba hugs Danyel and tells him that everything will be okay. The Exception ends with María adopting a child from a war-torn country and in Hotel Silence, Jónas helps the boy Adam to draw a new world rising from the ruins. Hope lives on in the children.

The Seagull Cup

Like the other white books, DJ Bambi has an apocalyptic atmosphere. At the start of the narrative, the main character, Logn, is considering suicide – planning her own private apocalypse like Jónas in Hotel Silence. However, she is thwarted by, for example, a plague of seagulls descending on the city and constant interruptions by sea swimming women.

Logn is, of course, planning to drown herself in the ocean, which method of suicide often appears in Auður Ava’s works. Two women drown themselves in Miss Iceland and one man in Hotel Silence. This is a literary and historical reference. One of the world’s most famous female writers, Virginia Woolf, drowned herself in the ocean when life had become unbearable to her, as did writer Vilhelm Moberg. Ophelia is one of our most famous drowned literary characters, although it is unclear whether she drowned herself on purpose. When María walks down to the beach in The Exception, Perla immediately assumes that she intends to drown herself.

Like in Animal Life and Eden, the climate emergency and the impact of the human animal on the Earth’s biosphere is a central theme in DJ Bambi. Due to global climate change, seagulls have largely stopped migrating and become resident birds, leading to a city-wide plague. Logn lives in a large apartment building where several resident council meetings are held in an attempt to deal with the situation, while the seagulls get increasingly aggressive.

Logn (Icelandic for “still weather”) is a trans woman who has waited years for gender affirming surgery. She is now 61 years old and close to giving up. Her twin brother, Trausti, is one of Auður Ava’s taciturn but handy male characters, and looks after maintenance and repairs without saying much. Trausti (Icelandic for “faithful/reliable”) is appropriately named and is Logn’s rock. He does his best to understand and support his sister, while most of their family has cut contact with her.

Names are important in all of Auður Ava’s works but never more so than in DJ Bambi. Logn is rejected by most of her family who refuse to give their blessing for her taking her grandmother’s name, Guðríður. This grandmother was the only person in whom Logn confided her difficulties as a child, and so has a special place in her heart. She goes by Logn while waiting for the family’s permission to take the name Guðríður Logn. It was also this grandmother who started calling her Bambi as a child. She had an Italian pen pal and Bambi is short for bambino, which means child. Logn went by DJ Bambi when working as a DJ during her student years and her twin brother continued using the name after their grandmother’s death.

Reflections on names and self-image like we see in DJ Bambi also appear in The Exception. María tries to stop calling her son, Björn, Bambi (and has his blond locks cut off) so that he will “become a man”. In Miss Iceland, Jón John is doubly marginalized as a gay man and a child of the occupation. His full name is Davíð Jón John Johnsson and he goes by DJ Johnson when abroad. Names are what people wear closest to their skin, they are interwoven with their self-image, and are very important to trans people. Logn tells us that the only people who call her V. (she never writes/speaks the name Vilhjálmur) are those who wish to hurt her and highlight her outcast status.

The image on the cover of DJ Bambi, a Seagull pattern cup with a smudge of lipstick on it, is an important symbol, not only of Logn’s rejection by her extended family but also of the power she claims for herself regardless. When Logn’s mother dies and her assets are being divided, Logn is excluded from the process and objects that usually have emotional value to family members are kept from her.  However, at the wake, Logn makes off with a cup from a coffee service in the Seagull pattern which belonged to her mother, and her mother before her. And she drinks from it often. Seagull pattern china appears in other books by Auður Ava, and is usually connected with characters’ mothers. China in this particular pattern is well known in Icelandic culture and has stong and varied associations in terms of class, cultural capital, tradition, and women’s culture. The Seagull cup is important to Logn, who feels a strong connection to her female lineage.

Of course, the seagulls in the pattern also echo the seagulls plaguing the characters, and in fact, birds go fluttering through all of Auður Ava’s books. The characters often have birds on their mind, and birds are used as symbols. Their deaths, behavioural changes or overpopulation portend the end times – but also symbolize renewal, f .ex. in Dómhildur’s text in Animal Life, where a bird starts to sing after humanity has destroyed itself.

Describing Logn’s transmutation into her true self at the end of the narrative, words like “resurrection” and “rebirth” are used. There is hope, and she rises from the ashes.

Isolated And Extraordinary

As mentioned above, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s texts all share clear distinguishing characteristics and revisit the same themes, symbols, references and issues again and again.

Auður Ava’s main characters all have certain traits in common and a major one is that, much like the people of Ducktown, none of them belongs to a happy conventional family unit. They are isolated despite often having admirers. They never get to have the person they long for, despite having a strong appeal for the opposite sex and quickly conquering the hearts of everyone else.

In The Exception, María’s husband abandons her but, being an icon of femininity, she is very popular with other men. Hekla in Miss Iceland cannot have Jón John’s whole heart but other men desire her, thanks to her overwhelming beauty. She outperforms other writers and has often been published in newspapers and magazines under a male pseudonym, despite being rejected when using her own name. She is also determined and strong and won’t be pushed around. In Hotel Silence, Jónas’ wife abandons him but other women desire and pursue him. He is an exceptionally capable handyman and seems to be the only person in the far away land who has a facility for repairs and maintenance.

In Eden, a young man becomes obsessed with Alba and barely leaves her side. In fact,  all the characters in Eden are a little obsessed with her. But Alba is still unlucky in love, despite her many desirable traits. Dýja, the midwife in Animal Life, has lost a child and a partner, but appears to excel as a midwife. She never takes time off and women giving birth ask for her specifically. Logn in DJ Bambi got divorced when she came out as trans, and her later attempts to find love are ended when she becomes the victim of an online grifter who manipulates her emotions. Logn is a biomedical researcher specializing in cell and tissue research, but is also interested in the ocean biosphere and has, f. ex., studied the complex systems of ocean currents.

Auður Ava’s characters are all extraordinary people but are not allowed to find love. Is this because they are first and foremost fictional or fairytale characters? Do “textual aesthetics” not allow a happy family life?

Who Is the Author?

Auður Ava often frames her narrative by positioning within it a character who might well be in the process of writing it. This character can be said to be both within and outside the story, like a painter who paints himself into his piece. In The Exception, Perla the neighbour is María’s author, as mentioned above. In Animal Life, Dýja reads her great aunt’s various texts, which also form part of the novel itself and have the same subject matter. Near the end of Miss Iceland, Hekla finishes the manuscript she has been working on throughout the narrative and has it printed. It follows the same characters as the novel and is 239 pages, again like the novel.

Alba in Eden is the ultimate main character (after all, she is named after the main character of the play Bernharda Alba’s House) and completely central to the narrative, despite not revealing much about herself. Her story is told by the supporting characters. Alba’s father tells both her sister, Betty, and his own friend, Hlynur, what is going on in her life, and so reveals what Alba herself has not confided to the reader.

In DJ Bambi, a journalist named Auður T introduces herself as Logn’s grade school classmate and wants to interview her. She later decides that the interview should become a book. Here we have “the author” yet again, a character who seems to be writing the text we are reading. Auður T talks big about how she intends to structure her book and DJ Bambi, the novel more or less follows that outline. Auður T eventually abandons the project, both because Logn’s life is not exciting enough, and because she finds it too hard to encompass a whole human life. Author Auður T abandons the work which author Auður Ava then finishes.

Texts To Change the World

To what extent is our story our own? Auður Ava seems to sympathise with her characters, who must tolerate various “authors” with their snooping, meddling and sometimes outright spying.

These are all agents of Auður Ava, a reflection or even a caricature of her as the author. The author character might be helpful, warm and fun like Perla, or selfish, nosy and irresponsible like Auður T, who misrepresents herself and “steals” her character’s life story.

Isn’t an author constantly stealing? Eavesdropping on people and making use of their lived experience, as well as working with other people’s narratives and text? At least, there are few authors who work with as varied a corpus of references and quotes as Auður Ava. References are, of course, one of the hallmarks of a postmodernist text, a text whose references direct the reader left and right, but maybe above all, in towards the text itself.

*

In interviews, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir has said straight out that she writes to change the world. In her works, there is always a danger. Something terrible looms, even a pending apocalypse. However, her stories all end with creation and hope, sometimes even resurrection and rebirth.
 

Þórunn Hrefna, 2024

Translated by Eva Dagbjört Óladóttir

Interviews

Mica Allen: “No Ordinary Journey”
Iceland Review, 2010; 48 (2), s. 36-38.

2019 - Prix Médicis: Ungfrú Ísland (étranger)

2018 - Bókmenntaverðlaun Norðurlandaráðs: Ör

2018 - The employees of booksellers award: Ungfrú Ísland (best novel)

2016 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Ör (Hotel Silence)

2011 - Prix Page des Libraires (Québec): Rosa Candida (Afleggjarinn, translated by Catherine Eyjólfsson). In the category translated fiction

2010 - Prix de Page: Rosa Candida

2008 - DV Cultural Prize for Literature: Afleggjarinn (Rosa Candida)

2008 - The Icelandic Women's Literature Prize: Afleggjarinn

2004 - Tómas Guðmundsson Literature Prize: Rigning í nóvember (Rain in November)

Nominations

2019 - The Icelandic Women's Literature Prize (Fjöruverðlaunin): Ungfrú Ísland

2018 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Ungfrú Ísland

2018 – Premio Strega (Italy): Ör

2012 - The Icelandic literature prize: Undantekningin (de arte poetica)

2010 - Lire (literary magazine, France): Rosa Candida

2010 - Prix du Roman FNAC: Rosa Candida

2010 - Prix Fémina (France): Rosa Candida

2009 - The Nordic Council Literature Prize: Afleggjarinn

2005 - DV Cultural Prize for Literature: Rigning í nóvember