After missing out on reviewing Icelandic author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s previous book, Hotel Silence (which earned many plaudits among critics and my fellow book bloggers), I decided to try out the author’s newest book translated by Brian Fitzgibbon, Miss Iceland (Ungfrú Ísland); what I read shows a unique sensibility – laugh out loud funny where the author skewers male chauvinism and male “poets” more concerned with the literary lifestyle than the art; and deeply moving in its depiction of 1960s Iceland and the stark choices faced by talented women writers like Hekla and her friend Ísey, who take separate paths over the course of the novel and make separate trade-offs; with another major element being Hekla’s friendship with the closeted gay sailor Jón John; the whole was handled with such good humor and creativity that I now want to go back and read the author’s first two books.

The main character of Miss Iceland is Hekla, whose Dad – a farmer from Dalir with an obsession with volcanoes – names her (over the objections of her mother) after Hekla, an active stratovolcano in the south of Iceland whose ancient nickname is “The Gateway to Hell.” When Hekla is four years old in 1948, her Dad takes her to see the eruption of her namesake. (“Jónas Hallgrímsson, our national poet, who produced the best alliterations and poetry about volcanoes ever written, never witnessed an eruption,” he tells the annoyed wife.) The trip to see Hekla the volcano erupt has a transformative effect on Hekla, the young girl. Afterwards, her mother recounts, “You spoke differently. You spoke in volcanic language and used words like sublime, magnificent and ginormous. You had discovered the world above and looked up at the sky.”

Flash forward to 1963. Hekla is riding a coach to Reykjavik, and the girl who loved Icelandic volcano-words has grown into the kind of person the majority of people would find inscrutable in any case, though even more so in 1960s Iceland, and especially so when the young person is question is a woman whose looks override any other notion men might form about her. So we find Hekla balancing a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses on her lap with a dictionary she uses to translate the same prose which poses serious difficulties even for native speakers of English. A middle-aged man gets on, asks if the seat next to her is free, takes it, and then asks about her book. Is it a foreign book? Yes, she says. But instead of showing any curiosity whatsoever about Ulysses, the man asks, “I see, is the girl checking out the boys?” asks the man. “Doesn’t a sweet girl like you have a boyfriend?” No. “What, aren’t all the lads chasing after you? Is no one poking you?” He proceeds with some crude remarks about whaling, but at this point Hekla is ignoring him. They are interrupted by someone pointing at a car and saying, “Isn’t that our Nobel Prize winner?” but instead of saying anything about Laxness’s work, conversation devolves into what kind of car Iceland’s greatest novelist is now driving.

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This opening scene introduces the general dynamic of Hekla’s experience. Hekla is a writer, in the most sober sense of the word; an obsessive, a virtuoso who has already written manuscripts for two novels and is presently working on a third. Her library is so extensive, it has an entire section devoted to another language, Danish, and we are told later that Hekla spends copious amounts of time in the few bookstores in Reykjavik where you can buy English books; she had read every book in her parent’s library, “starting on the bottom shelf and working my way up.” Her reading of foreign authors is a curiosity that no one around Hekla — pretentious poets not excluded — is more than cursorily curious about.

Instead, what most interests the men around Hekla is her physical appearance, which crowds out (in their minds) any other potential facet of her existence. The man from the bus approaches her at the station and tells her he is a member of the Reykjavik Beauty Society – which is holding the Miss Iceland beauty pageant – that he “can recognize beauty when I see it,” and therefore he would like to invite Hekla to participate. Hekla turns the man down, even as he insistently offers her his card and more patronizing words, and Hekla departs, only to later run into the Reykjavik Beauty Society meeting again at the Hotel Borg, where Hekla has taken a miserable job as a waitress. (“We don’t hide our beauty queens in the kitchen,” the head waiter tells her when she takes the job, “instead we’ll put you out serving in the dining room.”) Another waitress warns Hekla what she’s in for: the groping of pervy old men, men who “whisper into your ear, follow you, want to know where you live.” If a man follows you, the other waitress advises, duck into the lingerie store and ask them to let you escape through the back door. “They won’t dare follow you in there.” Hekla bemusedly wonders “whether there are any bookstores that save damsels in distress,” which, while funny, also highlights the absurdity of being this brilliant writer and all the same not exempt from the male gaze nor the lurid predations of perverts. Imagine being the next world-conquering literary titan – but no, what these old men see in Hekla is the next Miss Iceland:

“You’ll get to travel abroad, a limousine and private chauffeur.”

I quickly pick up the dishes.

“… Miss Iceland gets a crown and sceptre, a blue Icelandic festival costume with a golden belt for the competition on Long Island, two gowns and a coat with a fur collar. She gets to stand onstage and go to nightclubs and meet famous boxers and she gets her picture in the papers.”

This, needless to say, is not the kind of immortality Hekla is seeking; she declines. Nor is she enthralled by the designs on her life offered by a boyfriend, Starkadur, who works at the library by day but who is also a poet, which the reader is given to know because Hekla refers to him continually as “the poet” – “the poet wants to show” her things – and because he hangs out at Mokka, “the café where all the Reykjavík poets hang out, known back home as those smartarse losers who live down south and lounge about in public places drinking coffee all day.” Ólafsdóttir has a lot of fun at the expense of our poet, who takes great pains to say poetical things, be seen in poetical places, and hang out with poetical people.

If he’s not drinking coffee in Mokka, he’s at Hressingarskálinn. If he’s not at Skálinn, he’s at Laugavegur 11. If he’s not at Laugavegur 11, he’s in the upstairs bar in Naust, where the poets go when other places are closed. If he’s not at Naust, he might be found at the West End Café. Occasionally, he goes to meetings at the Revolutionary Youth Movement in Tjarnargata in the evenings.

Like a present-day group of Americans known as “Bernie Bros.” – I’m not certain I understand the concept of an “edgelord,” though perhaps that social media jargon applies here too – our poet primps himself on his very poetical political radicalism:

“It’s been nineteen years since Iceland gained its independence and wholesalers have taken over from the Danish kings and monopolistic merchants. They’re building shopping malls all over Sudurlandsbraut with the profits from Danish layer cakes.”

(Iceland would seem to be too cold and provincial to be an appealing morsel for our capitalist overlords, but you do you, poet man.) Even more obnoxious are the poet’s patronizing compliments, which are really only a more stuffy version of what Hekla hears at the Hotel Borg:

When he comes home, I immediately put my book aside and we go straight to bed. Before falling asleep, I check to see the colour of the sky.

“Is my maiden from the dales checking out the weather?” the poet asks.

[…]

“Every night with you is so immense,” says the poet.

Ugh. Ólafsdóttir has a wonderfully deadpan wit, as when she has Hekla convey a compliment to Starkadur from one of his fellow bro-poets – “He said you’re very talented and destined to become famous” – then has Starkadur smile and say, “I said the same thing to him the other day,” or has Starkardur say of one of the bro-poets’ poetry readings:

“It’s better than anything either Laxness or Thórberger Thordarson write. We might be talking about a new Nobel Prize winner, Hekla.”

“Has he had anything published?”

“Not yet.”

As for our esteemed poet’s own oeuvre, “[Starkardur] writes poetry and has been working on a short story. It transpires that he’s had one poem published in the Eimreid magazine.” When Hekla scoffs at his better-than-Laxness friend, he tells her, “Being a poet isn’t about output.” (William Hazlitt tears into this entire worldview in his essay, On The Application to Study: “Nature is not limited, nor does it become effete, like our conceit and vanity.”)

As snooty as it might seem to scoff at a struggling artist, Starkadur so richly earns his comeuppance by constantly referring to Hekla (to her face) not by her name, but as “my girlfriend.”

“Forgive me,” he says. “I’ve neglected my girlfriend.”

[…]

“Would my girlfriend like to take a coach trip east over the mountain to Hveragerdi village?”

[…]

“If the poets only knew that I listen to Elvis with my girlfriend. Can I ask my darling muse for a dance?”

The poet gets especially presumptuous with the my girlfriends when he is remonstrating Hekla for being seen with her gay roommate, Davíd Jón John Johnsson, who he repeatedly refers to as “the queer,” though in order to defend against the imputation of outright bigotry he tells Hekla, “If I didn’t know he isn’t into women, I’d be worried about you hanging out with him so much.” But not only is Starkadur a bigot against queers, he is narrow in the broader sense that he shows none of the curiosity requisite to becoming a great poet. Witness his behavior when he sees Hekla’s books.

He runs a finger over the spines, bewildered.

“Are you reading foreign authors?”

“Yes.”

He picks up Ulysses, opens it and skims through the book.

“That’s 877 pages.”

[…]

He stretches out for a book on his section of the shelf.

“It’s all here. With our writers,” he says, patting a cover to add emphasis to his words. “For every thought that is conceived on earth, there is an Icelandic word.”

Ulysses is an 877-page book by a “foreign author.” What’s it about? He does not ask. It does not exist, cannot exist, in his narrow world – to speak nothing of the insularity of the idea that Icelandic literature, or any particular literature, can capture everything. Starkadur’s lack of willpower, lack of curiosity, and lack of (for lack of a better term) stick-to-itiveness, make all the more pathetic his shock at learning that “my girlfriend is an author and I’m not.” Hekla tells him that the pseudonymously published short story which so astonished him and his bro-poets at the Café Mokka was only a “juvenile piece,” and this embodies what Hazlitt says of great artists and writers:

The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed.

As much as Starkatur’s artistic impotence appears stark against the foreground of Hekla’s fecundity, the relative freedom with which he and Hekla live their lives contrasts with the lives of Hekla’s two childhood friends, Ísey and Jón John.

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Ísey when we meet her is a young housewife, who is now married to Lýdur, a construction worker and sweetheart she met back home in Dalir. They have a baby girl named Thorgerdur, who Ísey hands to Hekla when they first meet at Ísey and Lýdur’s house; the husband is always away. But when Ísey opens her mouth and starts narrating the latest in her life, the reader becomes aware that Hekla’s friend is something more than an ordinary conversation partner. At one point later in the novel, Ísey tells Hekla, “I’m named after an iceberg. Pack ice flowed into Breidafjördur the spring I was born. Dad wanted to add an island to the fjord and baptized me Ísey, Ice Island.” As the common iceberg metaphor goes, with Ísey there is a great mass of feeling and (let us say) writerly acumen hidden beneath the surface, as a lengthy early monologue about her life with Lýdur and Thorgerdur admirably conveys. The journal she describes keeping – out of sight of her husband, who she says “wouldn’t understand” – sounds, well, quite writerly actually:

“I write about what happens, but since so little happens I also write about what doesn’t happen. The things that people don’t say and don’t do. What Lýdur doesn’t say, for example.”

She stalls.

“Because I add thoughts and descriptions to what happens, a quick trip to the store can take up many pages. I went out twice yesterday, once to the fish shop and once with the rubbish. When I walked to the fish shop with the pram, I shut my eyes and felt a slight heat on my eyelids. Is that a sun or not a sun? I asked myself, and I felt I was a part of something bigger.”

Her storytelling is wonderfully picturesque:

“Do you remember, Hekla, when we went ice-skating in the valley and slid all the way back over the frozen fields? You were ahead of me and there were tufts of yellow straw that stuck through the ice and the men that eventually came west to lay the power lines hadn’t arrived yet and everything was ahead of us.”

She sinks onto a chair and gazes down at her hands, her open palms.

“Today the first sunray in five months broke through the basement window. I sat for a short while with the ray in my lap, with my palms full of light, before I got up.”

Ísey’s at-times extraordinary manner of expression leads the reader to believe that under other circumstances, she could have pursued the dream of becoming a writer, like Hekla. But she can’t. In a chapter titled, “Medea,” she tells Hekla about furtively writing “eighteen pages about a woman who discovers her husband is having an affair and takes revenge by murdering their child.” To a normal person like Ísey’s husband, this would seem like madness; to the fruitful mind of a writer, however, always probing the darkest recesses of human consciousness, this idea is a mythopoeic trope that gives access to the deeper emotions that we’re feeling.

Section 1 of Miss Iceland is wryly titled, “Motherland,” because in 1960s Iceland, women are thought of as girlfriends and mothers, not writers. In all her narrations, Ísey is seen pushing the baby everywhere in the pram, a symbol of a motherly, if tethered life. The life of an independent writer, unencumbered by a husband children, is available (potentially) to Hekla, but not to her; Ísey can scarcely imagine it. She asks Hekla if she ever thought of going into Café Mokka to be with the poets, then asks,

“What would happen if I strolled into the cloud of smoke with Thorgerdur in my arms and ordered a cup of coffee? Or walked into an abstract art exhibition in Bogasalur with the pram?”

“You could give it a try.”

She shakes her head.

“You wear trousers and go your own way, Hekla.”

Hekla, who is named after a volcano and not an iceberg, has a different fate. “I can’t let it go,” she tells Ísey. “Writing. It’s my lifeline. I have nothing else. Imagination is the only thing I have.”

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This isn’t quite true; for Hekla needs a spiritual companion for her journey, someone who like her can travel outside the bounds of society’s conventions and live an alternative lifestyle. This person turns out to be her and Ísey’s best friend, Davíd Jón John Stefánsson Johnsson, with whom Hekla shares an apartment. Unlike Starkadur, he only refers to Hekla one time as “my girlfriend” ironically, in order to stop his fellow shipmates – he works as a sailor – from harassing him for not being into women.

One night, Hekla finds Jón John in the apartment covered in bruises. He was picked up by a man and his friend who took him to the outskirts of town and beat him. When Hekla says they should call the police, Jón John stops her. “There’s no point,” he says,

“Do you know what they do to perverts? I’m a criminal, a pathological freak. I’m hideous. […] They consider us the same as paedophiles. Mothers call in their children when a queer approaches. Queers’ homes are broken into and completely trashed. They’re spat on. If they have phones, they’re called in the middle of the night with death threats. […] I love children. I’m not a criminal.”

Like Hekla, Jón John is a victim of a narrow society, one that simply cannot allow for the existence of someone like him. He feels an ingrained sense of inadequacy because the prejudices of others make his life a living hell. “I’m a mistake who shouldn’t have been born,” he tells Hekla. “I can’t make sense of myself. I don’t know where I come from. This earth doesn’t belong to me.” Hekla doesn’t see him as a freak, however. He was a truly handsome young man who “wore a bomber jacket like the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.” He and Hekla were both each other’s first sex partners, a one time act of self-discovery that Starkadur the man-child poet can barely wrap his head around.

Jón John also shares with Hekla a need to look beyond the narrowness of Iceland, to find models for living in foreign places, among the great writers included in the “queer shelf” of his bookcase, Nobel Prize winners like Selma Lagerlof and Thomas Mann among them. Jón John also connects Hekla to the struggle for racial inequality that is ongoing in the United States, albeit scarcely mentioned in the local Iceland news. He reads Hekla an American newspaper clipping on the March on Washington which quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, and draws powerful connections between King’s words and his own life:

He has tears in his eyes. “King says the black man’s problems are the white man’s problems.” He carefully puts the cutting back in its place and looks me in the eye. “The problems of gays are the problems of non-gays, Hekla.”

Both he and Hekla live in a society that does not know what to do with them, that cannot provide for them what they need. Icelandic publishers cannot appreciate the significance of Hekla’s writing; the men Jón John surreptitiously meets with all slink back to their wives and are loath to even give him a ride back into town. They are two people who cannot get by in Iceland, and cannot find acceptance with others, and this leads to them having to rely on each other and seek freedom outside of their homeland; the second and last section of the novel, “Author of the Day,” concerns the beginning of their journey. Hekla thinks about the friend she is leaving behind, who describes giving up writing as, I’ve packed away my wings. They were a small bird’s wings that could carry me no further than east to the birch grove of Thrastaskógur, oh, Hekla.”

There is a lovely evocativeness in Ólafsdóttir’s choice of names in the novel, a symbolism that could probably be unpacked more by someone with a greater familiarity with the classic literature of Icelandic than I have. Hekla’s own volcanic name evokes a “Gateway to Hell,” but a volcano also represents renewal, the overturning of the earth, which Ólafsdóttir emphasizes in one of the last images offered in the novel when Hekla receives updates from her father, the volcano enthusiast, about the eruption and formation of the new volcanic island of Surtsey.

A bizarre whine resounds, not unlike the howling of an animal or the wailing of wind pressing against a loose windowpane in the heart of winter, and, just as swiftly, the floor of the 400-year-old guest house is jolted and there’s a rumble, as if a throng of forty horses had suddenly been unleashed from a bare patch of land and started to gallop. The earth trembles under the foundations, everything is in motion. The wardrobe shifts and I see it fall flat over the bed, the garden rails collapse, the windows shake, a fissure has opened in the earth. There is a cracking sound, like the wall has fractured.

The artful symbolism of this novel, together with some of the deadpan humor and heartfelt depiction of it’s trio of dissatisfied central characters, were the main factors that make me eager to read Ólafsdóttir’s other two books.