The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Qupperneq 13

SPRING / SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
123
Evelyn: Iceland is becoming urbanized.
Everybody is crowding into Reykjavik and
into the other towns.
Alfrun: And everything is becoming uni-
form because everybody lives in the same
place. There is no longer a ‘West’ or an
‘East,’ for example, where people talk dif-
ferently or look at the world in different
ways. We are becoming all the same, like a
herd of sheep.
Evelyn: It is probably due to television,
radio — to all of the public media that have
levelled the population. What is going to
happen to a nation that looks at the same
programs year in, year out ? Do you watch
TV?
Alfrun: I only watch a little bit some-
times. But I like films and films have had a
great influence on my writing style.
Evelyn: Your technique of writing scenes
and of fading characters in and out, par-
ticularly in your latest book, is reminiscent
of movies.
Alfrun: Yes, that’s true. But it’s not only
films that have influenced me in this re-
spect, painting too, which I observe very
closely. I create my scenes in this way be-
cause I can actually see them.
Evelyn: How did you find the title for
your latest novel, Hvatt ad runurri?
Alfrun: I don’t know if I read it some-
where or heard it, but as often with sayings,
I had to look it up and I found out that 1
had remembered it wrongly. It’s an expres-
sion that is no longer used in speaking and
therefore strange to people. The image
which the saying conjures up triggered
something in my mind: namely, that you
call somebody or talk to him tete-a-tete to
tell him a secret. I used ‘hvatt’ because it is
impersonal and can refer to either male or
female. It could also be both or could even
be the reader — in the novel I’m talking
tete-a-tete to the reader as well. And the ‘h’
which I use later on several times stands
for hofundur (author). But I conceived of
the author and narrator as a male. The
author isn’t me, but a persona.
Evelyn: That confused me. Why did you
think of the author as a man?
Alfrun: The Icelandic word ‘hofundur’
can mean both male or female author. I
was thinking of a male because the woman
character in my novel is making a revolt,
and her revolt is being reported by the
(male) author at the very same time that
she’s making a revolt against the author.
There is always a certain conflict between
a man and a woman, particularly a man who
is creating a woman persona, nevertheless
they are of course independent people.
Evelyn: You use the ‘I’ repeatedly
throughout the novel and describe it as an
onlooking, watching, perceiving, noticing
‘I.’ When I first started reading the book, I
thought it was you, of course. And, for that
matter, I still think it is partially you. It
seems to reflect what you think and what
you are yourself. Why did you weld the Late
Middle Ages together with the seven-
teenth/eighteenth century and then with
our own time? Does this vision of coalesc-
ing time come from your perception of lit-
erary history ? From your Icelandic per-
spective? Are all of these periods one and
the same?
Alfrun: They all move on the same level.
The collective past and present are inter-
woven, just as they are in individual life. In
a way we carry the past with us, in our genes.
I may be using an academic approach here
in my role as author, but I confess that I
conceive of writing fiction somewhat like a
scholar doing research. We are all links in
a chain. We add our contribution, so re-
search and knowledge can be carried on
in the future in a different way than we do
now. In the same way we survive as living
persons. This is also why I think the author
can influence his reader on how to perceive
the world.
Evelyn: Why did you use the Middle Ages
in this book? Apart from your dissertation
and your scholarly writings, your literary
oeuvre has not dealt with this period up to
now.