'Miss Iceland' Is A Subdued, Powerful Portrait Of A Suppressed Society

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Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's atmospheric novel, “Miss Iceland,” will transport you to another time and place — though not necessarily a rosier time and place.

Ísey, Hekla's other childhood friend, leads a suffocatingly lonely life, married to a barely literate construction laborer and homebound in a dark basement flat with one baby and another on the way. She struggles to stay sane by keeping a clandestine diary in which, since so little happens, she records what doesn't happen.

But so, too, is Hekla's unusual voice — reticent but firm, straightforward but wry, melancholic with an undercurrent of irony. In a series of very short chapters, she relays outrageous incidents with a calm that leaves space foroutrage: Jón John returns home bloody and battered from his nocturnal trysts with married men; Hekla is constantly harassed by male patrons at her waitressing job, including a man who repeatedly harangues her to compete in a demeaning Miss Iceland contest.

Hekla plays her cards so close to her chest that she doesn't even tell her boyfriend, a preening, pedantic poet, that she too is a writer, for she knows full well that what he wants is a decorative, subservient girlfriend. After he pries the truth out of her, he transfers his jealousy of her close friendship with Jón John, whom he invariably refers to as"the freak" or"the queer," to her disciplined output and clearly superior talent.

Volcanoes are a recurring theme in Ólafsdóttir's novel."When a man lives with a volcano, he knows there's glowing magma underneath," the poet comments after learning about Hekla's writing. He observes that Iceland's November, 1963 Surtsey eruption, which coincided with Hekla's birthday and preceded JFK's assassination by a week, gave rise to a new island.

 

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