[iceland]

an ongoing series by Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins

photo by Alice M. Guldbrandsen

A Happy Day-Nursery,
Gloomy Icelandic Fictions

Essay and Photos by Walter Cummins

All we knew about Reykjavik came from friends who owned an apartment there and others who had been quick-visit tourists. The city had a reputation among the young of Europe and the U.S as a great place to party, pulsating to the sounds of native rock bands. We knew three women who went there for a week of drinking, the highlight of their stay the night they closed a restaurant, with the owner joining their ongoing celebration. All that alcohol reminded me of tales told by a friend stationed miles from the city on an American air force base in the sixties. When they weren't flying, they filled the time drinking in the BOQ. It must have been catching. During the trip over, some in-flight reading revealed that seven percent of Icelandic males had been in rehab facilities. According to Alcoholics Anonymous World Headquarters, Iceland is the western country with the highest number of AA groups per capita. Does all that summer daylight and winter darkness have something to do with it?
Icelanders also have the reputation of being big readers, devouring books as much as they do booze. Figuring that imbibing alone wouldn't prepare me for the trip, I decided to read translations of Icelandic novels and watch Icelandic movies. Drunkenness abounded. Along with bleak destructive behavior, acts of betrayal, and dysfunctional families. Yet on the most recent world happiness scale Icelanders rank near the top, according to the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index.
John Carlin, in the May 18, 2008 issue of Britain's The Observer, opens with a litany of statistics that would seem to argue against happiness:

Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together –loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers – and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no.

        Beyond leading the world in book buying, enjoying near the longest life expectancy and per capita income, saving energy with volcanic thermal heating, and breathing pristine air, the most essential reason for this well being, according to Carlin, is “the hardy self-confidence that defines individual Icelanders, which in turn derives from a society that is culturally geared – as its overwhelming priority – to bring up happy, healthy children, by however many fathers and mothers.”
        Yet the people who populate the novels and the films are far from self-confident, wallowing in their misery. And the question of parentage figures prominently in a number of the stories. Perhaps it's a matter of happy families being so alike they're not worth reading about. Or perhaps it's a curiosity about others, say, their conception of awful Americans relocated to Icelandic settings. But googling, I did run across a study of borderline personality-disordered alcoholics in Iceland. They may provide the supply of fictional archetypes.
        101 Reykjavik is both a novel by Hallgrímur Helgason and a film directed by Baltasar Kormákur that won the Discovery Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. 101 is the postcode for the city center where rows of small houses, many covered with corrugated metal, line the side streets leading into the main shopping street, Laugavegur, which was accurately described to me as “about the size of an alley.”

The anti-hero protagonist, Hlynur, lives in one of those metal-sided houses with his mother and her female lover, Lolla. Seeing the film before I saw the city, I assumed that architecture was an aberration, suggesting the jerrybuilt dwellings of the world's shantytowns. Not at all. In Reykjavik, they're commonplace. At least in the original city. Today along the waterfront and in the areas around the center dozens of milti-story apartment buildings are under construction. No one in Hlynur's world lives in them, but there is a scene in the ultramodern Hallgrimskirkja church that literally towers over the city and that, during our visit, was covered in scaffolding.

Judged objectively, Hlynur should be despised or, at least, disliked by readers. (The film softens him by excising several of his more heinous actions.) A 33-year-old do-nothing, he milks the society's social support system and spends his endless free time watching porn, getting high on alcohol or ecstasy, and dallying in aimless sex. Of his homeland he says, “Iceland is a wind-beaten asshole and Icelanders are the lice on its edge.” Therefore, “Licelanders.” He also evaluates the sex appeal of every woman he meets or fantasizes about in kroner, the full list appended in four pages at the end of the book, from kr 100 for a couch potato mother to kr 4,700,000 for Pamela Anderson. Eve and the Virgin Mary place near the very top of the list. Many of the prices he places are cruel, as are the ways he treats real people. But the wit and energy of his first-person narration (translated into English by Brian FitzGibbon) can win over the reader. He describes ugly behavior in a compelling rush of words, often pages of them without a paragraph break.
Pregnancy figures at the center of the plot. Hlynur impregnates Hófi during a bored encounter that gives neither of them pleasure. He sabotages his sister's birth control pills, and she ends up pregnant. His mother, Berlind, and the younger Lolla decide they want a child. Is the source of the seed a surrogate male friend or Hlynur, who engages in mutual drunken seduction with his mother's lover after both overindulge at a New Year's Eve party? It's the most spectacular sexual experience of his life, the language of the description all fireworks.

. . . The sky erupts into a constellation of birthmarks. The silence in the navel of the explosion when she comes. The stillness in the eye of the cyclone . . . when I come. I come and, for a moment, everything brightens in a flash, a fireball lighting up the atmosphere and several continents below, before dissolving. And vanishing. What becomes of the sperm?

        Alcohol and pregnancy. But these aren't happy Icelanders comfortably casual about who fathered whom. Hófi has an abortion, Hlynur's sister a miscarriage. But Lolla delivers a child and, at the end, Hlynur, hoping it is his, bonds with the baby. A certain level of happiness, though for some readers, given his amoral legacy of indifference and destructiveness, the conversion may not be convincing.
        About one-third of the 330,000 Icelanders live in Reykjavik, the remainder scattered in towns and villages around the coast of the Island. A film called “The Sea” depicts a family in one of those fishing villages – a father, Thordur, in possession of an official permit to harvest an annual quota for the sea; his current wife who is the sister of his deceased wife; his two sons and one hostile daughter of the first marriage; his snarling octogenarian mother; a young woman “cousin”; his grandson addicted to video games; and the visiting pregnant French girlfriend of the younger son. There's also the father's mortal enemy, another fishing boat owner and one-time rival for the first wife; a bank manager who is having an affair with the older son's angry wife; an incompetent policeman named Bobo; and a fuzzy black ram that roams freely through the village, to Bobo's great frustration. The ram comes out as the most likeable of the lot.
        The village certainly is bleak, and the family fish factory must reek of fish heads and innards. Still, it's not justification for the family's behavior. If these characters had been real people, they alone would have plunged Iceland's rating deep into the pits of the happiness scale. As Stephen Holden wrote in his New York Times review, “If ever there were a movie to gladden the hearts of misanthropes, this is it.” He also notes, “The shabby village hardly fits the popular image of Iceland as a gleaming, pristine land of glaciers, hot springs and sleek modern architecture . . .”
        Unlike the tolerance with which the great majority of Icelanders treat divorce and illegitimacy, Thordur's family seethes with resentment, especially because he was carrying on with his sister-in-law while his wife was suffering through the years of slow, painful dying. To turn another screw, Thordur and his second wife have hidden the fact that he fathered with her the so-called cousin, Maria. Unfortunately, Maria is in love with the youngest son, Agust, home from Paris where he pretended to be working toward a degree in business while really writing songs and finding the spare time to impregnate the beautiful Françoise. Maria manages to seduce Agust during a naked midnight swim in one of those ubiquitous thermal swimming pools. When they learn it's incest, she doesn't care, but he reacts with horror. At the film's climax, Agust torches his father's fish factory, causing the old man's stroke. Agust and Françoise fly back to Paris, and all the others live miserably ever after.
        Arnaldur Indridason's Jar City is characterized “A Reykjavik Thriller,” though it's more of a procedural mystery with a number of clever and satisfying plot twists. While the book offers a map of central Reykjavik and another of the wider area with the routes to suburbs that figure in the story, the reader doesn't get a sense of the city, probably because the prose, outside of dialogue, is just a series of generic declarative sentences, such as: “Elin had stood up and was pacing the room in a frenzy. Erlendur sat tight and had sunk deeper into the soft armchair.”
        Erlendur, a detective with the local police, enters on the opening page after a body of a 70-year-old man is found on the floor an apartment. As expected, the mystery broadens and comes to involve Iceland's genetic research as well as several variations of the parent-child relationship, including the products of rape. Even divorced Erlendur's estranged daughter, Eva Lund, a down and out drug addict, becomes pregnant. There is a son he never sees, though Eva Lund turns up at his apartment begging for money and shouting abuse.
        The Jar City of the title refers to a secret collection of vessels containing human organs salvaged from autopsies in past years. The solution to the mystery hinges on recovering the brain of a long-dead child for evidence of a genetic defect that leads to the murderer. The detection moves from the old-fashioned jars to the studies being conducted by the Genetic Research Centre. I don't know if such a collection as Jar City ever existed, but the genetic research is certainly real. And controversial.
        In 2000, the government created a national health database, at first to contain medical and family histories. When the mission was expanded to include genetic information, opponents emerged from fear of privacy violations, abuse of the findings, genetic stereotyping, and a monopoly by big business. In fact, the parliament granted exclusive access to the health records to a biomedical company called deCODE genetics, which in turn signed an agreement with the pharmaceutical firm Hoffman-LaRoche that was seeking the genes related to more than 30 diseases, include heart conditions, emphysema, and Alzheimer's.
        What makes Iceland ideal for such studies is its small size and homogeneous population, the great majority of which, 80 percent, can be traced on family trees for many generations. The country is also very isolated geographically and, until recently, has had little immigration that would introduce new genes. As a result, people with a common disease can have their DNA investigated through a genealogical database for possible genetic causes.
        One common denominator found among the societies at the top of the list of the world's happiest people is homogeneity. Indridason turns that advantage into the source of brutal murders, the crime having been committed by the initial victim's son, a product of rape who has inherited a deadly genetic flaw that lay dormant in his parent. When he discovers the identity of the man who fathered him and the young half sister who died years before of the same disease, he takes revenge.
        These novels and films, in their obsession with parentage and family connections, play on the obverse of the very characteristics that have brought about the happiness of the Icelanders' lot. The extent of the misery depicted may be all imaginary. As one website notes, “Iceland is about as safe as a country can possibly get. The murder rate is close to zero.”
        Iceland's Nobel Prize author Halldór Laxness, who died in 1998 at age 95—another testament to the longevity of his people – wrote the novel The Atom Station in 1948. At that time, just a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he, like millions of others, feared the Bomb and the end of civilization. Laxness himself was in the midst of his pro-Russian Communism phase and hostile to the West, especially to American pressures to establish nuclear bases on Iceland, which had received independence from Denmark just a few years before on June 17, 1944. Laxness considers Parliament's decision to accept the bases an act of selling the country. But, despite this issue and the book's title, the real theme is a contrast of the decadence of life in Reykjavik, particularly among the affluent capitalists and politicians, and the pure north of the island, were wild ponies roam, nature is pure, and the spirit of the Sagas still prevails. The novel is narrated by Ugla, a young woman from the north who arrives in the city to serve as a maid in the home of the Member of Parliament representing her home area.

Though the novel addresses a number of social and political themes that skewer the urban poseurs, pregnancy and children become central to the plot. Those of the Parliament member and their equally rich cousins, progeny of the Prime Minister, are drunken vandals and sexually promiscuous. The beautiful elder daughter, called Dudu by her mother and Fruit-blood by Ugla, at fourteen becomes impregnated by a much older married man. Ugla, pregnant herself from a one-night encounter with a policeman also from the north, tells the girl her father probably will ship her off to America to have the baby and avoid scandal:

Genteel people with morals and sensitive nerves send their daughters abroad when they get into trouble, even though uncouth people like us don't understand that sort of thing and just have our children where we are.

Instead of to America, the girl's father sends her for an abortion: “He pushed irons up me. He killed me. There were bloody shreds of something in the bowl.” Ulga, in contrast, goes home to her parents to deliver her daughter: “When my mother showed her to me I felt I did not know her, but I felt a little fond of her at once because she was so little and large. And my father, who never laughs, laughed when he saw her.”
Ugla's child represents of a broader issue involving children, the building of a day-nursery in Reykjavik. The Town Council first defeated the proposal because it was a Communist idea and because such a nursery would lead to an increase in sexual immorality. Nurseries, those in power argue, should exist only in the home of true Christians and those of decent morals. “Why,” Ugla asks, “should there not be nurseries for the children of non-true Christians with wicked morals, such as me?”
It's clear whose side Laxness is on. Finally, the day-nursery is approved and Ugla chooses to unite with the father of her child and stay in Iceland despite the fact that it, like the rest of the world, has become an atomic station. If the Bomb came, there would be refuge among the fjords, streams, mountain tops, and wild ponies – the world of the Sagas.

In 1948, Laxness considered only those in Iceland's rustic north truly happy. Now happiness has spread through the land, and it's all a day-nursery. But novelists and film makers scorn.