She has to be a very good writer to reach the levels of success she has achieved with a name so impenetrable to readers from Oslo to the south. I remember the case of another illustrious Icelander, such as Arnaldur Indriðason, which seems to hide his real name in that kind of anagram. But no, the thing is that in Iceland they are called like that and for them Pepe Pérez must sound equally strange and unpronounceable.
The question is that Auður Ava Olafsdóttir reaches millions of readers. And he achieved it thanks to that emblematic work that every best seller needs as a lever, a «Candid rose» that explored that love of multiple meanings, from the most philanthropic to the most selfish. A work that teaches us that between both poles lies the definition of that search that encompasses everything in the mission of living.
It was an intermediate work, of that turning point marked more by success, with that component of random discovery by the general public, than by a significant change in its exquisite display of resources and motives of writing in substance and form.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
The writer
An author who specializes in microcosms and their destinies drawn like shooting stars in trail shapes that, however, do not disappear. Immortal lives for those who watch them shine in the dark dome. Everything you can and want to be like a projection made into a beautiful form of literature. Even more so when a writer narrates the creative and essential avatars of another writer in the same world faded by her dim light, not as past but always strange as ours.
Barely 180.000 inhabitants, a Nobel Prize in Literature, an American military base, two transatlantic airlines: this is Iceland in 1963. Hekla has always wanted to be a writer. In a country of poets, where every house is full of books and there are more writers per capita than anywhere else, Hekla finds only one obstacle: being a woman.
After packing all his belongings, including a typewriter, he arrives in Reykjavik with a manuscript in his suitcase. He goes to live with his friend Jón John, a homosexual man who wants with all his might to start working in the theater. Both will feel totally misplaced in a small and deeply conservative world, but one that will soon begin to change: the sixties promise to transform everything.
Silent hotel
Hotels store lives of passage as in a library as in a warehouse with their codes of letters and numbers. Always a good place to rescue what you are, stripped of that routine and that shell-like environment as friendly as it is narrow once broken.
His wife has left him. His mother's dementia is only advancing. You just found out that your daughter is not your biological daughter. Seeing that only his particular knack for repairs and housework still makes any sense, Jónas decides to grab his toolbox and take a one-way trip to a strange, war-torn country to disappear and put an end to it. this sad existence.
But the damage to the Hotel Silencio in which he is staying begins to require his attention, and so do the guests, and the inhabitants of the city, and his plan is postponed time and time again. Thus, with much humor and subtlety, Ólafsdóttir makes it clear that particular wounds, wherever they come from, only heal together.
The woman is an island
Every unforeseen start of a trip, thrown at us without a change of clothes, exposes us to impossible balances between the immobility that wants to hold us to a hasty life and the remote desire to rediscover a world that has continued to change despite us. In this novel we learn to row taking advantage of the tailwinds.
The protagonist of this great little story is a thirty-three-year-old woman whose husband has just asked for a divorce. Determined to make a radical turn in her life, and after the prophecy of a medium who assures her that in a distance of 300 kilometers she will win the lottery and meet three men -one of whom will be the love of her life-, she undertakes a Travel following the route around Iceland. She will not go alone: Tumi, the son of a friend in distress, two stuffed animals, and a box of books and CDs will accompany her on the way.
Other recommended books by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
The truth about light
On the podium of suggestive titles, this truth about light would be there, fighting for first place. You doubt whether it is about a new theory of relativity or perhaps an existential exploration of our world in need of sunlight that may be extinguished at some point in the future... The point is that up in the northernmost part of Europe they already know the value of light on its strictly scientific level or on a more human level. Because then there are the shadows...
Descended from a lineage of matrons, Dýja is also what they call in Iceland "mother of light." Her parents run a funeral home, her sister is a meteorologist: being born, dying and, in between, weathering a few storms. In the midst of a hurricane threat, Dýja helps bring her 1922nd baby into the world. She is trying to fix up the apartment she has inherited from her great aunt, cluttered with furniture, flickering light bulbs and a fruit box full of manuscripts: the aunt Fífa continued the work that her great-grandmother had begun of interweaving the stories of the ancient midwives who traveled through the country's wastelands in the middle of a blizzard with her own eccentric and visionary reflections on the planet, life... and light.
Meanwhile, in the attic, an Australian tourist seems to have traveled to the antipodes to take stock of his life. Human beings are definitely the most vulnerable animal on Earth, and the thin thread that unites us to life is as fragile as the northern lights.
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