It is said that Icelanders only have two topics of conversation: trees and whales. Two things that have become rare on this island in the North Atlantic, located between Greenland and Norway.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir laughs when we talk to her about it. “It’s a lie, I think,” she said, in French please, with a smile in her voice.
Even though we find whales in almost all his novels, as in The truth about light (Zulma, 2021), in which midwives helped stranded whales. Anddenits 8e novel since The bright red of rhubarb in 1998 — in its original version — talks a lot about trees and reforestation.
“It’s my favorite animal,” adds the author of Rosa Candida (Zulma, 2010, Prix des libraires du Québec), contacted at her home in Reykjavik, Iceland, who says she collaborated on the writing of songs by the Icelandic contemporary dance and electronic pop music group Milkywhale — play on words between “whale » and “Milky Way”.
Eden tells us against a backdrop of ecoanxiety the story of Alba, a professor of linguistics at the University of Reykjavik, specialist in endangered languages, perhaps too conscious of her carbon footprint, who acquires a small house been in bad shape with its 22 hectares of inhospitable land. A few hours drive from the Icelandic capital.
A land of rock, solidified lava and sand, “a peat bog beaten by the winds” that she courageously undertook to reforest with, among other things, several hundred birch trees. To manage her guilt as much as to compensate for her ecological footprint, she has been jumping from one international conference to another for years.
Light scent of apocalypse
Slowly obsessed with her new environment, which she seeks to transform for the better, Alba will begin to build stone walls to protect her garden from the wind. Very quickly, she sells her apartment in the city, then resigns from university, before falling in love with a teenage refugee from a country at war, Danyel, 16, who shows a real interest in the Icelandic language. . Between two visits from a Jehovah’s Witness taxi driver who comes to speak gently to him about the Apocalypse…
Between the scent of roses and that of the end of the world, Eden hesitates. “It’s a novel about what is disappearing, like languages and nature. There is also something new in all my novels, and that is human nature, I think. The paradoxes that make us human are what interest me. And in this particular novel, the idea was to write about the feeling of guilt of human beings. »
If all his writings are “born from despair”, this eco-anxiety and this guilt are also a little his own. Before the pandemic, in 2019 alone, the writer remembers having made 18 trips abroad.
There is also something new in all my novels, and that is human nature, I think. The paradoxes that make us human are what interest me. And in this particular novel, the idea was to write about the feeling of guilt of human beings.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir also wanted, she says, as she did in several of her novels, to implement the idea of repairing or restoring what is in poor condition: apartment, house, garden. “And also sort of fixing the main character. »
There are not many trees left in Iceland, which has become a sort of cold desert where sheep graze peacefully – also sometimes invaded by tourists. It is said that the forest represented 35% of the territory at the time of the colonization of the island (compared to less than 1% today).
“We realize, when we live in Iceland, how tiny we are compared to nature. » The winds that blow, the volcanoes that erupt, the glaciers, the sea that surrounds everything, that nourishes and takes lives: it is easy to recognize that the land of Iceland is not the most hospital on the planet. “I wrote in a previous novel that if man needs nature, nature does not need man,” recalls Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.
Roots and wings
And if the novelist is so interested in botany in her books, it is a paradox that is undoubtedly easily explained. “While I was writing Rosa Candidashe remembers rolling her r, my garden in central Reykjavik was neglected. I didn’t have time because I was writing about what I didn’t do for a living. »
Implicit in the novel, it is impossible not to see the link that exists between immigrants and the plant species that the protagonist attempts to introduce, something recognized by this art historian trained at La Sorbonne, who has long been a even professor at the University of Reykjavik…
Because just as the trees have difficulty clinging to this volcanic soil, Iceland also struggles to retain the immigrants it welcomes. Many have difficulty establishing roots there and dream of continuing their journey to Germany or Canada. The “Land of Ice” is never their first choice. The difficulty of the Icelandic language, of course, constitutes a significant obstacle, believes the novelist, even if unemployment is almost absent there.
Beneath its light veneer of humor and finesse, as is often the case with her, this new novel is also a beautiful tribute to the Icelandic language, whose exotic words, for once, are peppered throughout the novel. A kind of exposure therapy.
“It’s also a bit of my specialty to write in a minority and marginal language that no one understands,” recalls Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Around 6,000 languages are spoken in the world and every two weeks a language dies. And when we lose a language, we also lose a whole thought specific to each language, we lose a culture. »
“With Icelandic, which could disappear one day,” she continues, “we would lose the only language to my knowledge that uses the same word to say “world” and “home”. When we travel, we are at home. And when we are at home, we are part of the world. » A language where “understanding” someone and “divorcing” are expressed using one and the same verb, skilja…
But a language is also made of silence, she believes. Iceland, with its 2 inhabitants per square kilometer — compared to 6090 inhabitants/km2 of the Gaza Strip — is for her the country of silence.
“What I miss most when I’m abroad is the silence. Even though I live in the center of Reykjavik. Iceland is my personal monastery, in a way,” she adds.