Miss Iceland

A Novel by
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Translated by Brian FitzGibbon

Iceland in the 1960s.

Hekla always knew she wanted to be a writer. In a nation of poets, where each household proudly displays leatherbound volumes of the Sagas, and there are more writers per capita than anywhere else in the world, there is only one problem: she is a woman.

After packing her few belongings, including James Joyces’s Ulysess and a Remington typewriter, Hekla heads for Reykjavik with a manuscript buried in her bags. She moves in with her friend Jon, a gay man who longs to work in the theatre, but can only find dangerous, backbreaking work on fishing trawlers. Hekla’s opportunities are equally limited: marriage and babies, or her job as a waitress, in which harassment from customers is part of the daily grind. The two friends feel completely out of place in a small and conservative world.

And yet that world is changing: JFK is shot and hemlines are rising. In Iceland another volcano erupts and Hekla meets a poet who brings to light harsh realities about her art. Hekla realizes she must escape to find freedom abroad, whatever the cost. - from the Amazon review.

The above blurb doesn’t address style. Miss Iceland is tersely written (there seems to be a lot of that going around these days) yet full of dropped names, places and 1960s references. A reader without a background in Icelandic culture and the layout of the City of Reykjavík would quickly find themselves overwhelmed by all the information. I could suss out most of the references and I could appreciate the dramatic arc of the book (Icelandic country girl goes to Reykjavík and discovers herself and a whole new world), which was and is a real-life experience for thousands of young Icelandic women. That part is fine. I found that the relentless references to 60s culture were just a bit too much baggage for a novel this slim to bear. There is also an egregious howler of an anachronism in the middle of the book that shattered my suspension of disbelief.  Previously, I really enjoyed Auður’s Hotel Silence and also liked Butterflies in October but Miss Iceland left me cold.

This just might be the last Icelandic book I’ll read for a while, at least until Sixty Kilos of Sunshine by Hallgrímur Helgason is available in an English translation.

In the broader scope of things, I find that I have pretty well exhausted all my Icelandic cultural pursuits. That fact, coupled with the Covid-19 travel restrictions, makes the prospect of my returning to ‘the rock’ dim. After having said all that, it may well be that  by this time next year things will be completely different.

My experiences with 20+ years of Icelandic culture made for a pretty nice ride, however.