In Iceland, at this time of year, the sun rises a little before noon and sets in the middle of the afternoon. Conversely, at the summer solstice in June, in Akureyri, a town located in the far north of this Nordic country, the daylight lasts more than 23 hours. No wonder the Icelandic people ‘s connection to the light is not trivial.
In the first pages of The truth on the light, by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Quebec booksellers award for Rosa Candida in 2010 and Medici Prize for Miss Iceland in 2019), we discover that Icelanders, invited to elect the most beautiful word in their language, have chosen a noun designating a medical profession: ljósmóðir, literally “mother of light”, or “midwife” in French.
A few days before the Christmas holidays, Dýja is working overtime at the birthing pavilion. She inherited the gift of her great-grandmother and her great-aunt Fífa to bring babies into the world, and also her apartment (retro decoration included) and a box of Chiquita bananas. which contains his notes and observations on the human, animal and plant kingdoms in their relation to light.
While appearing messy and unstructured, Aunt Fífa’s manuscripts allow one to look at the world from the point of view of a woman in awe of the origin of human life and its mystery.
From this perspective, attention is focused on “ephemeral and perilous phenomena”.
The infinitesimal meets the infinite. We learn that humans adopt at birth the smell of “potatoes stored in a cellar, a mixture of earth and sweet mold”, that they are “capable of greater cruelty than any other species. towards his fellows ”- which makes Fífa suspicious of those who are more than fifty centimeters tall. Why do some “seek beauty and others not”?
How is it that some people carry the light within themselves while “others try to drag us with them into the depths of darkness”?
Sweetness and poetry
At one point, Dýja’s sister meteorologist asks if Aunt Fífa, in her writings, understood the relationship between humans and light. Answer: “It turns on, it turns off. It turns off, it turns on […]. His behavior is similar to that of a child playing with a switch. “
These scattered details collected and then analyzed from a knowledge of life at its pole of the most extreme fragility, this very pretty collection of wandering thoughts gives a contemplative novel filled with sweetness, poetry, dazzling.
However, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir can be blamed for a tenuous plot despite a good dramatic potential in connection with the changing weather of the country and the threat of a storm too quickly dispatched, as well as a final a little blue flower that the Icelandic author suggests without insisting.