A stirring novel about the complexity of family relationships, trauma and the absence of communication, but also about love and life.

On the day her boyfriend leaves her, Rakel’s world is turned upside down. The news comes as a shock for Rakel having grown up in difficult circumstances and now being estranged from her family and with few friends. But just before she completely goes to pieces, she gets a surprise visit.

• Forlagid’s New Voices manuscript contest 2021

 R E V I E W S

“An immensely powerful and compelling portrayal of a fractured nation. Disturbingly intriguing debut work . The portrayal of the mother’s character is executed with exceptional brilliance. It’s one of those rare gems that shines even more brilliantly upon reading.”

HALLGRIMUR HELGASON, AUTHOR

“Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina—that all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way—could well serve as the trail of breadcrumbs through Anna Hafthorsdottir’s novel, which was recently released as a selection in Forlagid’s New Voices, a series that seeks to introduce readers to fresh, young authors. The story is told from the perspective of a young woman who comes from, to put it mildly, a broken home, a place that ought to provide children with shelter and security, but at times home turns out to be something else altogether. While it’s often the case that broken homes are the result of alcohol, illicit drugs and violence, that’s not what we find here. This is a story of abandonment, if one is going to put a label on it. It tells us of a person abandoned by her loved ones, and who abandons them in return. …

The story is told in two narrative threads. On one hand, we have a first-person account in the present where the narrator Rakel is being left by her boyfriend for reasons not revealed until later in the story. On the other, we have a first-person account from the past, Rakel’s childhood and teenage years, in which the narrator’s father abandons his family with any explanation, or at least no explanation that the children Rakel and Robbi are provided. Their mother’s reaction is peculiar to say the least as she begins to count out loud to a million and will not speak to her children all the while. In this light, the story is about the lack of communication in a broken home, which emerges as a motif in the story and Rakel’s personality. As a defense mechanism she shuts down lines of communication with people, besides the fact that she has kept her experience growing up to herself. For example, her boyfriend knows almost nothing about her and, as a result, finds it difficult to understand the woman he loves very much, but she has not allowed him access to her troubled past.

The treatment of children in the story is also indicative of another one of Rakel’s fixations: having children, her desire for a child and her aversion to it. It’s no coincidence that the character is called Rakel (Rachel), and the allusion to Jacob’s wife from the Book of Genesis is clear. The difference is perhaps that the biblical Rachel doesn’t wish to be barren, while Rakel the book’s character does not want to have children, which comes as no surprise, as you may imagine, when we get to know her family life over the course of the story. The narrator brushes up against that paradoxical desire for children and the freedom of childlessness in a brief interchange with an old female friend she hasn’t seen for some time, a friend she herself abandoned to some degree. The friend complains a little over her difficulties but says “it’s still great fun.” The narrator responds: “Yeah, I get it,” I said, though of course I didn’t get it. She smiled politely through the wall, the artfully embroidered wall of communication between women with and without children.” Communication without communicating.

There are also some big questions posed about the roles of parents, and to this end the author does a remarkable job at communicating the perspective of children. The parents are two deeply damaged individuals. The mother is clearly afflicted by some kind of obsession, suffering from mood swings that the children can’t understand, and it is the right authorial choice to hold a logical explanation back from the readers, as we are meant to perceive this from the vantage point of the children. The father is either borderline noncommunicative or extremely egocentric, but we know even less about him since he up and leaves with no explanation or even a goodbye to his children. And he maintains no contact with them afterwards. These conditions are wretched enough for a child’s upbringing, but the devil is in the details of how the family communicates with one another, which is true of all families. In the rush of the day, adults often fail to perceive their child’s experiences, only to cringe when their adult child asks about some moment from the past, one they themselves have long forgotten, but has been etched in stone in the child’s psyche.

Families, every one of them, are also the source of stories. It is the delightful stories that are so often told when we’re having a good time, the ones that get told over and over again, and maybe that’s what Tolstoy meant: good stories are all alike, but each painful story is painful in its own way, if they’re ever even told in the first place. The writer of this story weaves it together in a remarkable way with the family story of great-grandmother Lilla, who went to the theater and got so wrapped up in the play that she began shouting at the actors on stage. This is a classic family story that the narrator’s mother tells, which prompts the narrator to think about what funny story she could tell about her own mother. “It used to seem as though she could read my thoughts, and then she added: ‘Stories get more amusing once time has let them marinate. The past is romantic, the future is thrilling, but the present is a drag.” And yet somewhere in the backdrop of this quaint, little family story is the fact that great-grandmother Lilla took her own life.

Anna Hafthorsdottir demonstrates an impressive command of language and style, and it was a pleasure to see how she shapes the story around the jumps in time between narrative threads and carefully doles out information to the reader in just the right amounts. She also hits her stride at the end of chapter seven when the narrator recounts, in a nearly obsessive manner, everything she did wrong in her relationship and in communicating with her boyfriend. Here we see the successful rhetorical deployment of anaphora on display, as the reader is allowed a glimpse at the molten core of a young woman who has been abandoned and blames herself for everything. It is truly refreshing to read such powerful prose, even when the subject matter on the page is anything but pleasant. That said, it was handled deftly and went straight to the heart of this story, which provides a kind of proof that there is something to old Tolstoy’s assertion. This we come to appreciate through a brilliant narrative about the most complicated conundrum in every life: family.”
GAUTI KRISTMANNSSON, VIDSJA, RUV, NATIONAL BROADCASTING SERVICE