Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.12.2016, Síða 26

Oddný Eir is a collector. That’s why
autumn, she says, is her favourite sea-
son. “Autumn is the collecting mo-
ment. You collect everything—the
berries, the sheep
and the children
for school. There
i s the a n x iet y
that w i nter i s
coming, but that
makes it more ex-
citing.”
Amongst the
berries and sheep
and children for
school, Oddný is
also a collector of
stories. She has
kept a diary, writ-
ing in it almost
daily, since she
was eleven years
old. It was her
way of absorbing
the ever-changing surroundings.
In 2011 Oddný published ‘Jarðnæði’,
her third novel. The book was nomi-
nated for the Icelandic Literary Prize
the same year. In 2012 it won the
Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize
and in 2014 the EU Prize for Litera-
ture. Earlier this
year the English
translation was
released, entitled
‘Land of Love and
Ruins’. The story
takes the form
of a diary, and
weaves between
dayd re a m a nd
day-to-day. Some
of t he det a i l s
tumble into phil-
osophical inqui-
ries, others are a
single descriptive
or playful line.
“I’ve been
th i n k i ng a lot
about writing in
symbols,” Oddný says of this book.
“It was written almost schizophreni-
cally. You have to read it like a schizo-
phrenic. If you read it simply as narra-
tive, you will lose a lot.”
“Surely beauty must
be in motion. Or be
motion.”
Oddný’s father lived in the north of
Iceland. She spent summers there
with her brother and dreamed of
one day raising a child in the idyllic
Icelandic countryside. In the coun-
tryside they were strangers. Oddný
was young, from the city and didn’t
understand the way things worked.
“We didn’t know anything,” she says,
“and the farmers told us, ‘You don’t
know anything.’ I was so small and
eager to learn, I was just picking up
everything, trying to figure out how
it worked.”
Then she moved to Hungary. Then
to Paris. “I was alone again, a strang-
er, always just listening and seeing
how things functioned.” When they
moved from France back to Iceland,
Oddný was different from her Icelan-
dic peers. “I couldn’t pronounce the
Icelandic ‘err,’” she says. “I had the
French ‘err,’ and I had a patch over my
eye to help me see clearly. So I was this
tiny thing with one eye and a funny
accent. But I wasn’t a loner.”
With the help of her mother, Oddný
found a sense of playfulness in every-
thing. “The girls would play games
with me, but I didn’t understand some
of the basic rules” (and she admits: “I
still don’t”). She made a field of the
sidelines, she made observation a
game of her own. “I think that’s a bit
like the writer in me,” she explains.
“You’re in the middle of something
but sometimes you are just ‘off,’ look-
ing and thinking…”
“Few fear the old fox
roving through the
lava, russet and inde-
pendent.”
Oddný waited many years before she
ever considered publishing a book. “I
always had this feeling that I had to
understand things, and live things,
and feel things better,” she says.
When writing in her diary usurped
other interests in her life, she knew it
was time.
“Suddenly I felt that writing in
my diary was much more important
than studying, that each day I was just
waiting to get into bed with my diary.
It was more important than lovemak-
ing. And when being in your diary is
more important than studying, than
being in love… yeah, it’s something.”
Her first few books were like “five
books in one,” she recounts. “I liked
that effort, I liked to have them so
solid. They mentioned everything in
my life I wanted to write about, as if
to be my first and last book.” But then
came ‘The Blue Blood’. In 2014, Oddný
published this 40 page ebook, which
chronicled a woman’s search for a blue-
eyed man to impregnate her. “It was
very direct from what I lived,” she says.
“I put it together, and sent it away.”
Books 26The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 18 — 2016
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