Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir had not been to Quebec for five years. We took advantage of her visit to the FIKA(S) and Québec en lettres festivals this week to talk to her about her luminous latest novel, as well as the one to be published.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
The last time we met her was in 2017, a few months before the publication of her novel Gold. Since then, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir has won the Prix Médicis for Miss Iceland, in 2019; writing The truth about light, the French translation of which came to us last year. Despite the passage of time, the writer has lost none of the poetry that drives her and the sweetness that emanates from all her novels, from the unforgettable Rosa Candida who revealed his unique feather to the whole world.
The pandemic — and the paralysis of travel it has caused — has been extremely beneficial to her from a creative point of view, she confides, allowing her to complete a second text in parallel to The truth about light while she was confined to her “black island”.
“The pandemic has given me the opportunity to reflect; in all my novels, I try to understand human nature, these paradoxes that make us human,” she says in a French with Nordic overtones.
The starting point of The truth about light was the word chosen by Icelanders in 2013 as their favorite: midwife. A word which, in their language, is composed of two others — mother and light. “At that point, I decided that I would later write a novel where the protagonist was a midwife, and that it was going to be a book about light in a world of darkness. »
The novel pays homage in a way to those who risked their lives in all weathers to give birth to women all over the island. “Until 1950, Iceland was a poor country, without roads, we traveled on horseback and the midwives often went on foot,” she says.
And to make the “praises” of the life that these women gave, it was necessary to go through death.
A novel is constructed by oppositions; to write a book on light, the scene had to take place during the darkest period, at Christmas, because it is in the darkness that we really understand the meaning of light.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
In search of beauty and meaning
There is hope in The truth about light, insists Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, even if it is easier, in her opinion, to be pessimistic – and above all more interesting for a writer. “All my novels ask a bit about this question of how to survive, how to assume our responsibilities towards our loved ones and towards the planet. »
“I find it poetically logical that a midwife was going to be a specialist in humans, the most dangerous and cruel animal, but also full of beauty and generosity. How does this animal that is born naked, without fur, and totally depends on others, turn into this selfish and cruel animal? she asks candidly.
In the background of the story, there is the climate crisis, which is hitting the Icelanders with full force, with increasingly violent storms and the melting of the glaciers which makes them fear terrible volcanic eruptions in the more or less future. less close.
And it is through the character of the great-aunt, “this somewhat eccentric midwife” who no longer believes in men although she still believes in children, that she seeks to make us aware of the fact that we already knew, 50 years ago, that we had to take our responsibilities towards the planet, but that we did nothing.
PHOTO DENIS GERMAIN, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
My writings are born out of desperation. I desperately seek beauty and meaning; meaning is a bit like organizing chaos. And beauty, for me, is not an object, it is an experience that changes the way of looking at the world and oneself; something that destabilizes, too.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
His next novel, which should be published in a few weeks in Iceland (the date is not yet known in French), will be called Eden. It will be about a garden where nothing grows, in the middle of a lava field, that a linguist will acquire to plant trees there. Maples, moreover, whose name in Icelandic, she points out, is also a masculine given name—Hlynur.
As always, in his novels, we find the island, the elsewhere, those who come from elsewhere and these significant relationships that form between two individuals whose paths had a priori no reason to meet. And also her language, a complex language, she admits, of which she fears the disappearance because it is only spoken by 350,000 inhabitants, but of which she is one of the first ambassadors by making us discover it with poetry, one word at a time, in each of his novels.
The truth about light
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Zulma
224 pages