Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.12.2016, Side 27

27The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 18 — 2016
“Isn’t it a kind of
extravagance to try
and save the coun-
try before you have
solid ground be-
neath your feet?”
With ‘Land Of Love And Ruins’,
Oddný bounds further into the
realm of fiction, but keeps her
gaze fixed on what’s familiar. Like
Rilke’s ‘Notebooks of Malte Lau-
rids Brigge’, Oddný’s “diary” leads
its reader through the first-per-
son landscape of a life and a mind.
The narrator uses her daily writ-
ings to tease out questions of in-
timacy and solitude; of building,
breaking and rebuilding relation-
ships; of a person as part of the
whole; of what even is the whole.
“I used the book to write about
the intimacy of family members,
like my relationship with my
brother,” she says. “It took a while
for us to reinvent this intimacy.
We had lost it, then we found it
again and had to create it with a
lot of work. I think it’s worthwhile
to write about that; how to make
intimate relationships… it’s not
easy. It will never be easy, actu-
ally, to be close to someone.”
“Closeness has to
be like running
water; it mustn’t
stagnate and turn
sour.”
There is a compulsion amongst
most writers to write about what
is painful, what is broken, what
is wrong. “We need to talk about
ugly things,” Oddný says. “It’s
much more difficult to write
about things which are beauti-
ful. I have tried to write about my
last love relationships, tried to
capture what was beautiful, but
it comes out as cliché: ‘I feel very
good, it’s very nice’. But I do want
to write about what is beautiful.”
To w rite gracef ul ly about
“what is nice, what is beautiful,”
requires a lot of effort. “I believe
in evolution,” Oddný says. “And I
believe in smaller evolutions. The
destructive forces are so active;
they are always there to break
down love, to break down fami-
lies, to break down societies. To
put it into shit and violence. These
forces are so strong that you can-
not just be passive. If you want
to fight against it you have to be,
somehow, active.”
A year and a half ago Oddný’s
son was born. She moved to the
South Coast and commenced cre-
ating her “happy little family on
the farm.” She had sheep. She had
a goat. She had the dream.
When we meet to talk it is in a
café on the sleet-covered streets
of Vesturbær. Her house is just
down the block, her books are
still in boxes from her move back
to Reykjavík. “Fuck the sheep,”
she tells me, with the playful re-
silience of a mother. “Fuck the
dream.”
“The family form is
probably one of the
forms that needs to
be blown apart at
regular intervals, to
allow it to realign
itself in the grass
and grow from the
soil anew.”
Her teal eyes and twirling mind
look into the rain on the other side
of the window. Even on her down
days, in cozy mornings at a café
in Vesturbær, Oddný is collecting.
Maybe it’s a thought that will end
up in one of the three books she is
currently working on. Maybe it’s
a diary note, or something more
fleeting.
Even though she’s back in
Reykjavík, Oddný is still that little
girl in the countryside. An “ac-
tive stranger,” as she described it.
Taking it all in: collecting, recol-
lecting, preparing for the winter.
“You mustn’t bury
yourself alive, for-
get to rise up or
bind yourself to the
dust in melancholy
surrender.”
All quotes from 'Land of Love and
Ruins'.
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