Latest Review: "The Greenhouse" by Audur Ava Olafsdottir

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse, which is available from AmazonCrossing in Brian FitzGibbon’s translation from the Icelandic.

As Larissa—one of our excellent contributing reviewers, who loves the Scandinavian and is starting to learn Icelandic—points out at the beginning of her review, this is the first of ten (yes, ten) Icelandic works that AmazonCrossing will be bringing out over the next year. A few are announced on their site (a little place called Amazon.com that you may have heard of), and of the forthcoming titles, the one I’ve heard is most amazing is The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrimur Helgason (who is an incredible writer).

This is great news for the Icelandic literary scene, and will surely bring a lot more attention to the non-crime fiction writers one can find there. (Such as Bragi Olafsson and Kristin Omarsdottir, two Open Letter authors you should all read.)

Here’s the opening of Larissa’s very positive review:

2011 has been a banner year for Icelandic literature on the international stage. “Fabulous Iceland” was this year’s guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and in August, UNESCO named the Reykjavík as one of its five Cities of Literature—the only such city where English is not the native language. Perhaps even more notable for American readers, however, was the recent announcement that Amazon’s new publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, will release an astounding ten Icelandic titles in new English translations over the next year. Judging by the press’ first Icelandic selection, The Greenhouse by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, English-readers can look forward to a catalog of remarkable Icelandic titles in the coming months.

At once wryly observant and sweetly comic, The Greenhouse is a meditation on such sweeping themes as sex, death, becoming a parent, manhood, and finding a place for oneself in the world which doesn’t once fall prey to cloying generalizations or cliche. Rather, through the eyes of twenty-two year old Arnljótur Thórir—or Lobbi, as his elderly father affectionately calls him—author Audur Ava Olafsdottir breathes a freshness and sincerity into her subject matter which is as charming as it is insightful.

The novel opens with a birth and a death. Having lost his mother in a car accident just a year earlier, Lobbi is also adjusting to his unexpected new role as father. His first child, Flóra Sól, is the product of the unlikely indiscretion of “one quarter of a night, not even, a fifth, more like it.” His mother’s death and the birth of his daughter both take place on the same day, which also happens to be his mother’s birthday. Lobbi’s father ascribes this confluence to “some intricate system,” while his son dismisses the coincidences as meaningless chance. “In my experience,” he sagely remarks, “as soon as you think you’ve got one thing figured out, something completely different happens.”

To read the whole piece, simply click here.