Hlín Agnarsdóttir

An Attempt at Conversation

I am an incredibly young author, in the sense that I am really just getting started. I didn’t go the traditional route like most writers who publish their debut novels in their early twenties. My first novel didn’t come out until I was 48 years old, and it was agonising. The most agonising part was writing it. Finding a title was also agonising, but eventually the story came to be called High Up on the North Ridge.

Before settling on that title, I thought The Trials of Adda Isabella was more fitting, and I still think so. But I was afraid readers would confuse me with Adda Isabella, the main character, especially because I had gone through a period of great trial and tribulation in my personal life right around the time the book came out. The artist’s soul is a sensitive one, always on guard and concerned with how others perceive it.

Trying to join an established, tight-knit community of writers was also agonising. I felt like an imposter, like I didn’t belong. I had always lived primarily in the theatre world, writing plays and directing. One of my plays, Ladies’ Room, had been a huge hit at the Reykjavík City Theatre, and I felt a great deal of pressure to replicate that success. But I certainly didn’t manage that with this first novel. I had failed to say what I wanted to say. I hadn’t reached the reader. And the book was slaughtered by critics, though not all of them. In the wake of that experience, I fell into a deep depression and took to my bed.

Writing is not least of all a search for connection with others, an attempt at conversation about the things that matter, a platform where there is time and space for authentic, uninhibited expression. It is only now that I realise the importance of all this and, at the same time, the need to have one’s own voice. Early on in my career, I often wrote to entertain people, as Þórunn Hrefna put it in her overview of my work. That focus on entertainment was most obvious in my plays; humour served as a sort of manic protection against the unbearable evils of the world, because I think the world is evil on the whole. And humour still serves me well, though my writing has evolved in a different direction since Adda Isabella was psychoanalysing people in that first novel.

Entertaining people is certainly one way to forge connections, to make people pay attention and listen and to get that recognition that artists crave above all else. It all goes back to childhood – “Look at me, look at me!” the child says through their actions, competing for attention and for acknowledgement of their existence. As a child, I got the most attention when I was funny, when I told funny stories and mimicked people. Gravity was never far away, though; it was to be found lining an entire wall of the living room in our house on Brávallagata, on teakwood shelves laden with literature, serious literature – the Icelandic sagas, Halldór Laxness, Þórberg and Einar Ben and other poets. Mamma was mainly into poetry, loved Davíð Stefánsson and Tómas Guðmundsson, recited poems with great feeling, an absolute hedonist when it came to beautiful words. When a young actor by the name of Arnar Jónsson became a frequent guest in our home, he and Mamma bonded over their shared love of poetry. Our pleasure increased tenfold as the young actor’s voice brought new life to familiar poems.

Mamma was also my first literature teacher. She was highly critical, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of all sorts of authors and texts. One Christmas, when I crawled up in bed beside her, crying after having lost myself in some poorly translated, absurdly melodramatic love story, it didn’t take her long to show me how unremarkable it was. She opened the book, chose a passage to read aloud and analyse and tore the story apart. After that, I didn’t read many more love stories like that. Instead, I read more new novels by Icelandic authors such as Svava Jakobsdóttir, the first female Icelandic writer whose work – especially her short stories – had a real impact on me.

More than once, my curiosity led me into the masculine world that rested on those teakwood shelves, where I discovered world literature like Black Boy, Tonio Kröger, War with the Newts, The Greek Myths, The Merchant of Venice. Luckily for me, my parents were members of the Mál og menning book club and also subscribed to the progressive publishing house’s literary magazine. Mamma sometimes warned me there were things I would not understand until I was older. She probably wanted to protect me from more disconcerting material, like Karel Capek’s dystopia. She could tell I was sensitive, feared I would have nightmares. But sometimes, when everyone else had gone to bed, I snuck into the living room and whiled away blissful hours alone with those books, reading by lamplight in the dark.

Regular reading, discussions about books, interviews with authors, and constant exposure to books have been at the core of my literary upbringing. I’ve always found it important to have a personal library, to be surrounded by books, to be able to reach for books – both read and unread – whenever I need them. After leaving the theatre, I turned almost exclusively to teaching creative writing and focusing on my own writing. In so doing, my connections, understanding and literary taste have grown and undergone continual and sometimes unexpected change. I will always be grateful for that.

Today, I am 69 years old and mostly read books by women. I’m extremely pleased to see how female authors have taken the literary world by storm and shaken things up. They illuminate a world that was previously concealed in darkness, writing about women’s thoughts, feelings and bodies, about a world that used to only be seen and interpreted from a male perspective.

For anyone who wants to write and create art, there is perhaps little of greater importance than the ability to be moved. And I am still particularly moved by the creative power bursting forth from the new generation of writers and artists of all genders. I feel I belong more to this generation than to the one that will soon disappear. That is why I consider myself an incredibly young author with plenty left to read and write, both in the light of day and by lamplight in the dark.
 

Hlín Agnarsdóttir, December 2022

Translated by Julie R. Summer