Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2019, Qupperneq 20

20 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 09— 2019
“When I decided to
become a writer,” says
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir,
“I started relatively late,
like many women writers.
I asked myself this very
simple question: ‘Do I have
something to say?’”
Despite her early reservations,
Auður did have something to say, and
she has since written words that have
resonated with readers worldwide.
Though she began her literary career in
her late thirties, Auður has undisput-
edly made her mark on Icelandic litera-
ture, writing bestseller after bestseller,
and finding fame from Iceland to
France to China; she even snatched the
Nordic Council Literary Prize last year
for ‘Hotel Silence.’ “I made the decision
to give a voice to those that didn’t have
a voice in my novels,” she explains,
nibbling on a homemade croissant in
her dining room. “You know, there’s no
such thing as an innocent text.”
Auður often speaks like this, just
like the voice her novels—dissecting
her own words, and then organising
the overarching concepts into simple
statements. Oftentimes, she’ll ask
herself questions and then answer
them. The late-blooming artist has the
uncanny ability to format and unravel
the small moments of human existence
into pithy words and statements that
make you stop and think about your
own life. Auður is a novelist, yes, but
she’s more than that: she’s a scientist.
Discover-
ing worldly
literature
Auður’s youth told a different story.
Growing up in Reykjavík, Auður was
interested in reading, but didn’t neces-
sarily identify as a voracious reader. In
the 1970s, the breadth of her intake was
limited by the availability of Icelandic-
translated literature. In high school,
they focused on the Sagas and Halldór
Laxness, rather than the greats of the
international community.
In fact, she didn’t start reading
foreign writers until she went to study
abroad at age 21. “I went to study in
Italy, and Italian was really the first
foreign language I knew at the level
where I could read difficult literature,”
she explains. “It was like a whole new
world opening to me. Being born on a
remote island, and speaking a marginal
language that few people know, learn-
ing a foreign language was the door to
worldly literature.”
She began to read Pavese and Elsa
Morante, among others, and when she
moved to Paris years later, entered the
world of Marguerite Duras and Hervé
Guibert. It was during this time that
Auður’s lifetime fascination with the
limits of language was born. “I was
getting to know writers that were so
completely different than anything
that had been translated to Icelandic,”
she says.
Guibert’s books, in particular, taught
her to be uncompromising with her
words. “He was just so unlike anything
I had read before,” she explains. “It
was so poetic. It was so raw. It was so
daring. I was a stranger in Paris speak-
ing with Russian-accented French; and
somewhere, as a writer, I was born,
many years before I started to write.”
Duras’ works, on the other hand,
allowed her to experience viscer-
ally what she had missed in Icelan-
dic translations. “She’s impossible to
translate because it’s all breathing;
it’s all between the lines, between the
words. When you see it in any other
language, it’s just not, well, you know,”
she pauses, trying to find the right
words to describe not being able to find
the right words. If there’s anything that
articulates this conundrum, Auður’s
thoughts have found it.
It’s interesting that Auður counts
Duras and Guibert as the spark that lit
up her passion for literature. Duras,
most famous for ‘The Lover’ and the
script for ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour,’ is
known for her peculiar take on prose.
She wrote autobiographically, albeit in
the third person; unpretentious and
bold, she often explored the feminine
experience in her works. “A man and
a woman, say what you like, they’re
different,” she once famously wrote.
Auður’s works also show that same
autobiographical quality, albeit less
obviously than Duras’. While Duras
wrote books that were explicitly about
her own life, Auður’s works take a less
direct inspiration from her reality—
but if you look deeper, her own expe-
riences are clearly there. Moreover,
Auður was distinctly inspired by Duras’
ability to distill truths down into their
most direct and purest form.
Born poets
and geniuses
Auður´ newest novel, ‘Ungfrú Ísland
(‘Miss Iceland’), which will be released
later this year in English, shows this
style most clearly. The story is set
in 1963, and charts the travails of a
female writer who can’t find her place
in a male-dominated literary society,
where women are not allowed—where
they, unfortunately, belong in the
home.
“In ‘Miss Iceland,’ a character says
this,” she says, exhaling, preparing
to quote a difficult passage from her
novel. “Male writers are born poets
and they become geniuses by the age
of 13, but women writers are born with
a body and they become pregnant.”
She lets the thought sink in, a hint of
sadness flashing across her face. “If
you look at autobiographies of people
like Nabokov or Sartre, you can see
that they are born poets and just have
to explain why they became geniuses.
But women writers often start writ-
ing around the age of puberty and the
body is central to their stories and it’s a
problematic body. It can get pregnant.”
The writer within the novel is
clearly talented, a distinct parallel to
the geniuses of Icelandic literature
like Laxness. “For my hero, everyone
is more interested in her body rather
than what she wants to say. She’s
supposed to be a very original writer
with a different voice, and so they
can’t put her in a box,” Auður explains.
“That’s why she isn’t being published—
because she isn’t writing like male
writers.”
The book’s message, Auður empha-
sises, is one of freedom. “It’s a book
about liberty, the need for liberty and
the search for beauty,” she says. It then
dives into what beauty is, specifically,
within Iceland. “You know, the mean-
ing of beauty in a society that organises
beauty contests,” she says with a small
smile.
The others
of society
Unlike Auður was, the heroine in her
novel is well aware of literature outside
Iceland. She has a sailor friend, who is
a homosexual—an outsider, like her—
who brings her works like “The Second
Sex” by Simone de Beauvior and novels
by Sylvia Plath. For authenticity, Auður
made sure such books were available in
English or Danish during the year the
novel was set.
“In 1963, Sylvia Plath committed
suicide, Kennedy was shot, and it’s also
the year of the Surtsey eruption near
Vestmannaeyjar,” she says. “I looked at
this very isolated society in the light of
what’s going on abroad.”
She made the eruption of Surtsey a
fundamental moment to illustrate the
plight of women at that time. “When
you get the news of the eruption, it’s
the women doing the washing up who
are watching the cauliflower in the sky,
and they phone a friend who is wash-
ing up in another house, and that’s how
the news spreads,” she explains. “Some
say it’s like a dystopia. It’s so black and
white. It’s a male-dominated society,
every aspect of it. Just men smoking
their cigars and making all the deci-
sions in politics, no women and all,
and very few women in the world of
literature either.”
Taking a
chance on the
unknown
The protagonist’s plight as an ignored
author isn’t unlike what Auður faced
at the beginning of her career. At first,
Icelandic publishers were wary of her.
“In a way, it was a male dominated
society in Icelandic literature until the
21st century,” she explains. “I had to
fight for my novels. With my second
novel, ‘Butterflies in November,’ no one
wanted to publish it. The male publish-
ers all played football together, and
had synchronised their taste in litera-
ture—so if one said ‘no’ to a writer,
they all did.”
After many rejections, Auður
finally found a publisher. “I found a
woman publisher—Hildur Hermóðs-
dóttir from Salka Publishing,” she
grins, clearly having great affection for
the first person who took a chance on
her. “She was my saviour.”
Auður then sent one chapter of the
novel to a small publishing house in
France. “I was quite happy with my 200
readers in Iceland,” she explains, but
she still decided to try out the inter-
national market. “It was too expensive
to translate it all, but my publisher
lent me the money. At the same time,
‘The Greenhouse’ was nominated for
the Nordic Council Prize and it was
translated into Danish and got very
good critical reviews. In France, it then
became a bestseller and won the prize
for the best foreign novel of the year,
selling 300,000 copies.” She pauses.
“But Icelanders didn’t know anything
about me.” Eventually though, with
time, Icelanders came around, and
Auður became an integral part of the
canon of Icelandic literature.
Auður is a female writer who often
writes male protagonists, much to her
audience’s confusion. “I remember
when I was published in France, my
name ends with -ur, which is usually a
sign of a male name,” she laughs. “They
were probably expecting someone
else.”
The pitfalls
of language
Along with a focus on the others of
society, Duras and Guibert instigated
a fascination with translation within
Auður that would prove fundamental
to her career. “I’ve always been inter-
ested in what’s practical and imprac-
tical about minority languages,” says
Auður. “There’s a different way of
seeing the world in each language.”
When talking about the unforgiving
grammar of the Icelandic language,
things get complicated. “Take a
demonstrative pronoun like ‘enginn,’
which means ‘nothing,’” she says. “You
have 24 different ways of saying what’s
nothing, depending on the nature of
the void. Enginn, ekkert, engar, and so
on. My translators often say I use so
many different ways of speaking of the
same thing,” she laughs.
She then begins to talk about her
favourite Saga character, Melkorka
of the “Laxdæla Saga.” Melkorka was
stolen by the viking Höskuldr, and in
protest, she stopped speaking. At one
point, when she thought no one was
listening, Melkorka spoke to her own
son in her native Celtic language, which
later causes her own detriment. Auður
was so inspired by Melkorka’s rebellion
that she named her eldest daughter
after the character. “I thought that not
speaking was so courageous,” Auður
explains.
Melkorka,
the silent
Melkorka was also, no doubt, a funda-
mental inspiration for one of Auður’s
most beloved works—the tragicom-
edy ‘Butterflies In November,’ which
has consistently found a place on
Grapevine’s must-read lists. The main
character is a translator, but is forced
to take on the sole responsibility
for a deaf-mute son of a friend, who
speaks only in sign language. “There’s
a silent person and one that speaks
many languages,” she explains. “But
the translator has difficulty express-
ing herself verbally. It’s a very physical
novel.”
Auður’s most widely translated
novel, ‘The Greenhouse,’ tells a simi-
lar story. It’s about an Icelandic man,
who, after a series of pitfalls, journeys
to a monastery. There, he encounters
a monk who speaks 34 languages. The
novel is full of evocative prose that
concentrates on the banal exchanges of
life, and in that quotidian matter, taps
into the larger aspects of being human.
Auður attributes these contrasts to
the fundamental tenet of her novels.
“A novel is always built by oppositions,”
she explains. “If you want to write a
novel about life, you speak about death.
If you want to write about women, as
I did in ‘Hotel Silence,’ you make the
main character a man. In ‘Butterflies
In November,’ I wanted to confront
this character who speaks too many
languages with someone who didn’t
speak, to somehow show that there
was this world beyond languages.”
Something
bigger, some-
thing true
At this point, Auður needs a break from
discussing her novels. Taking a bite of
her croissant, she smiles. “There’s a
particular smell of croissants in the
oven. It reminds me of my mother
and my grandmother. I feel safe,” she
says. “I feel like I have cleaned up the
house the day before Christmas, even
if it’s a mess.” Once again, Auður has
managed to dissect her thoughts beau-
tifully, perfectly articulating the beauty
of childhood through the simple act of
eating a croissant.
It’s this focus on small actions that
has become characteristic of Auður’s
prose. “I think that’s actually my