Book Review of Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
UPDATED: 2/5/2023
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256 pages, originally published in 2018 in Icelandic and in 2020 in English
YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:
literary fiction * novels about trips * modern Icelandic literature * novels about feminism * novels about LGBTQ characters
TRAVEL INSPIRATION:
Oh Iceland! This novel is set predominantly in Iceland’s capital of Reykjavík, though some portions are in more rural parts of the country where the main character grew up, and there is a brief portion towards the end of the novel set in Denmark. As in her other novels, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir paints an authentic picture of Iceland, this time as it was in the early 1960s. As I have shared in other posts, I have gone on a bit of a reading spurt of her novels after our second trip to Iceland had to be cancelled due to COVID, and I have found the closest replacement possible by reading about this country.
This novel referenced specific roads and routes through downtown Reykjavík, so I was able to travel there in my mind’s eye, though I’m sure my 2018 trip vistas were different than the city in the early 1960s! If you have been to Iceland or plan to go in the future, I can’t recommend highly enough this and other novels by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Born and raised in Iceland, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir currently resides in Reykjavík where she is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Iceland. She lived in Paris while obtaining her art history degree from Sorbonne. At present, Auður has written 6 novels. Miss Iceland is her sixth and most recent novel, translated into English this year (2020). She has received several literary awards for her novels and is also a playwright and poet.
I recently read and reviewed Ólafsdóttir’s second novel, Butterflies in November, (you can read that review here), and her fifth novel Hotel Silence (you can read that review here). Next in queue is (The Greenhouse). It is rare for me to read so much in such short order by the same author, but there is something that appeals to me about Ólafsdóttir’s stories - her playful writing style while still tackling tough issues - and what is emerging as a consistent trend to her novels - characters at a crossroads in their lives taking a journey as part of the path forward.
Note: because the Icelandic tradition is to use patronyms instead of family names (i.e., Ólafsdóttir literally means ‘Olaf’s daughter’), it is appropriate to refer to Auður by her first name. On pronunciation: the letter ‘ð’ (capitalized Ð) is pronounced like a ‘th’ sound so her name approximates to oi-th-ur. The letter is called ‘eth’ (just like the letter b would be bee).
REVIEW OF Miss iceland BY AUÐUR AVA ÓLAFSDÓTTIR
Iceland in the 1960s was not exactly like my home country of America in the 1960s. A better comparison of Iceland in the ‘60s would be America in the ‘50s: a place where the role each person played was tantamount; women were to be wives falling in step behind their husband’s successes, and to be gay was to struggle to find a place in an unfriendly world, best managed through a loveless marriage to the opposite sex. Miss Iceland’s main character, Hekla, and her best friend, Jon John, each represent one half of those populations.
Hekla, named for a volcano due to her father’s love of them, desires to be a female writer. The reason for both of those words - female and writer - is that it was unheard of in the 1960s for a woman to be a writer in Iceland. Men were writers and poets. (Side note: Iceland is a very literary society with the highest number of writers per capita in the world.) Hekla spends her time seeking out examples of women writers elsewhere as if they are a rare breed and comes across examples such as Sylvia Plath. She is also painfully aware that she writes in Icelandic, a language that has a very small reachable readership. Though, this is a woman stretching her abilities; case in point: she is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in English.
Jon John is a secondary character but plays a large role in Hekla’s life, and the author verbosely describes his struggles as a gay man trying to find happiness and fulfillment but only seems to discover torment. The crescendo of his impact weighs heavily as the novel progresses while his own sense of self resembles the peaks and valleys of a radio wave frequency.
Both characters struggle to make their own ways in an unfriendly world. Hekla pairs up with Starkadur, a vain writer whose success keeps falling short. He suffers from writer’s block but persists with the dreamy ambition of a would-be writer. Meanwhile, Hekla hides from him her own literary pursuits, which have been far more successful than his own. By day, she works at a hotel restaurant, where she is treated to the height of misogynistic behavior, particularly by a man with promises of an exciting future if only she will agree to compete for Miss Iceland (hence the novel’s title). The only person who really sees Hekla for who she is is Jon John and Hekla’s friend who is unhappily fulfilling her wifely duty of popping out baby after baby, each adding to her mental anguish.
Add in a mix of volcanic history (with eruptions at sites we visited while in Iceland ourselves), dreams of fleeing what would have felt like an insular island to the glory of America or Europe, and you have yourself this memorable novel that is - at the end - bittersweet.
As an American, I found it interesting that the characters were aware of the goings-on in the United States during the same era. They read articles on the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and found inspiration that a better future could exist for both of them.
For those interested in learning more about Iceland’s literary and social history, I would recommend the non-fiction Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland.
DISCUSS miss iceland
For those who have read Miss Iceland, we would love to hear your thoughts on it! For those who haven’t, what are some other novels that successfully depict ‘outsiders’ trying to find their place in an unwelcoming world?
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Check out our other reviews of Icelandic books:
Interested in other books by this author?
Check out our review of Hotel Silence.