Audur Ava Olafsdottir: Miss Iceland (2020, Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated)
256 pages
English language
Published Oct. 11, 2020 by Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated.
Loved the prose, really embodied the restlessness and tension felt when we struggle to break free from the rigidness of conformity.
I enjoyed this short, episodic novel set in the early 1960s Iceland (a much more hardscrabble country than it is today) about a young woman who is a writer and persists in her dream of being published in spite of the obstacles. After traveling to the capital, she keeps in touch with a friend who also writers, secretly - an outlandish thing for a housewife to do. She's pregnant with her second child and quietly in despair about her lonely life and the prospect of yet more children to tie her down. Her other close friend is a gay man who suffers as an outcast and wishes he were different. And there's the poet she moves in with, who hangs out with a group of exclusively male writers and loves her, but keeps falling back on traditional gender expectations - and is jealous of her creativity. Eventually, the woman who …
I enjoyed this short, episodic novel set in the early 1960s Iceland (a much more hardscrabble country than it is today) about a young woman who is a writer and persists in her dream of being published in spite of the obstacles. After traveling to the capital, she keeps in touch with a friend who also writers, secretly - an outlandish thing for a housewife to do. She's pregnant with her second child and quietly in despair about her lonely life and the prospect of yet more children to tie her down. Her other close friend is a gay man who suffers as an outcast and wishes he were different. And there's the poet she moves in with, who hangs out with a group of exclusively male writers and loves her, but keeps falling back on traditional gender expectations - and is jealous of her creativity. Eventually, the woman who writes and her gay friend head south, looking for a better life. I'm not sure why I found this story so compelling. It has, in some ways, a modest canvas and avoids pounding home the feminist message as it portrays a woman who refuses to give up her writing for a more conventional set of expectations. She is "Miss Iceland" - representing a stubborn commitment to living her own life on her own terms - though throughout the book she resists entering beauty pageant that might bring her opportunities. Quietly absorbing.
