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Vetrarsl
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Wikipedia article
'Vetrarsl' ('Winter Sun') is the fourth novel by Auur Jnsdttir, published in 2008 by Ml og menning. Reviews include those in 'Der Spiegel', 'Hamburger Abendblatt', and 'Morgunblai'.
Style and themes
With a female protagonist, Sunna, who presents herself as often rather bewildered by the world around her, written in the first person and in an often confessional tone, and drawing on stream-of-consciousness styles, 'Vetrarsl' satirises chick-lit. As in other work by Auur, the novel meditates extensively on motherhood and mother-daughter relations. The plot is structured around Sunna's peripheral involvement in a police hunt for a missing woman, her ex-flatmate and friend Arnds; Sunna's peripheral position enables the novel also to satirise the melodramatic character of crime fiction.
Summary
The novel is set in Reykjavik. Sunna recounts events in her life running from December 1 to 9 in an unspecified year. These events are intertwined with her recollections of her time as a student in the Raval district of Barcelona about ten years before.
In the novel's present, Sunna's partner Axel leaves for a business meeting in safjrur, but his ex-wife has asked him at short notice to look after his son by his first marriage, Helgi. Axel is then trapped in safjrur by bad weather for the rest of the novelthough it transpires at the end that the main reason for his delay is his desperate and failed attempts to rescue his ailing business. Sunna, despite having spent little time with Helgi previously, has to care for him throughout the novel, and their developing relationship is an important thread. Much of the novel is framed by Sunna's attempts to juggle her work as an under-appreciated employee at a publishing house with looking after Helgi, often with the help of her mother, a characterful working-class left-winger.
At the beginning of the novel, Sunna sees in the news that Arnds Thodrsdttir has gone missing. She and Arnds had been flatmates while students in Barcelona, and much of the novel comprises Sunna's reminiscences about this time. It emerges implicitly through Sunna's account that Arnds is an outgoing but also domineering character, with a tendency to islamophobia structured through her feminism (which implicitly overlooks the insights of postcolonial feminism). While in Barcelona, Arnds gets to know an illegal immigrant from Morocco, Fatma. Sunna acquires a Spanish boyfriend, Jordi, and gets pregnant by him, and is guided by Arnds to get an abortion.
With the encouragement of Helgi and her mother, framed by their participation in a class on writing crime novels which Sunna is involved in running as part of her work, Sunna makes some effort to investigate Arnds's disappearance. Arnds's previous husband, Benni, was murdered while working as a doctor in Africa; Sunna discovers that he was involved in a company called Futura Nostra that harvested human egg-cells from people in poor countries in return for providing medical care. Sunna meets Arnds's new partner, Garar, but fails to be much help. This contact does lead her later to encounter Arnds's young daughter by her first marriage, Hera. After this point, she is followed by three young men who at one point corner her and threateningly ask where Arnds is. Sunna thinks she may recognise one; the police later warn Arnds that these men may be terrorists.
Eventually, Sunna divines that Arnds must be hiding in an art gallery she has set up at Stokkseyri, and finds her there. Revealing that she has guessed that Hera is actually Fatma's daughter and not Arnds's, Sunna forces Arnds to explain what is going on. It emerges that Fatma had been raped and got pregnant. She was afraid to admit this to her family, fearing ostracisation. Arnds convinced her to disguise the pregnancy, to give birth a secret caesarian section operation performed by Benni, and to give Arnds and Benni the baby, which they would pretend was their own. By Arnds's account, Fatma died of infection as a result of the operation and was secretly interred by Benni. When Benni was murdered, Arnds also pointed the police to Fatma's brothers. The three men who threatened Sunna were indeed Arnds's brothers: when she heard they had come to Iceland, Arnds fled.
The novel ends without neat resolutions. Arnds collects Hera from school and flees the country; Sunna realises she is pregnant, and looks forward to motherhood; she is glad to have established a relationship with Helgi; she puts her relationship with Arnds behind her; and she must steer the family through Axel's latest business failure.
Translations
Audur Jnsdttir, 'Jenseits des Meeres liegt die ganze Welt', trans. by Kristof Magnusson (Mnchen: btb, 2011),
References
Category:2008 novels
Category:Icelandic novels
Category:Novels set in Iceland
Category:Icelandic books
Category:Icelandic-language novels
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