Entertaining people

A new article about Hlín Agnarsdóttir’s work by Þórunn Hrefna has been published on the Reykjavík City Library’s Literature Web. The article covers Hlín’s career up to the present day and is shared here in its entirety.

 Long before she published her first novel, Hlín Agnarsdóttir had already made quite a name for herself in the theatre world. Among her more widely known works for the stage is Don’t Give Up, Guðmundur (with Edda Björgvinsdóttir, 1984), a revue that tells the story of Guðmundur, a man of the so-called ’68 generation. Looking back on his life, he tells his son about the student revolutions, protests, and hippie culture of his youth. Ladies’ Room (1996) takes place in the women’s restroom at a nightclub and parodies various aspects of Icelandic party culture. These two plays enjoyed long theatrical runs and great popularity. Hlín’s other theatrical works include: The Worldwide Travels of Erna (1993), which won first place in a contest for plays that address the AIDS crisis. The eponymous Erna promotes Icelanders’ freewheeling attitudes about sex but finds herself having to rethink her own sexual liberation when she suspects she may have contracted HIV. Another example is Gallery Njála (1997), which was described as “a funny, erotic, and quintessentially Icelandic contemporary play that tells of the dramatic love affair between a highly educated woman and a tour bus driver who meet on a trip to see the area where the Icelandic saga Njála took place”. Hlín has penned many more works for both stage and radio.

 A charade on the North Ridge

 Hlín’s first novel was High Up on the North Ridge, released in 2001. The cover calls it a “brilliant contemporary novel” in which the author “gives the nation a swift kick in the pants”. There is certainly enough happening in the book, which opens in a block of flats in Reykjavík at the turn of the last century. Hlín writes about Adda Ísabella Ingvarz, who has lived in the same flat her entire life. Adda knows and interacts with most of the residents in her building, and she has a steady stream of visitors coming and going as she is a modern minister of sorts who operates a miniature psych ward in her bed, “drying the tears of the suffering”. She invites her clients into her bed, theorising that doing so fosters trust and confidentiality: “Everyone is most comfortable in bed, especially with other people. It’s a place where secrets are whispered and teardrops fall onto pillows” (19), adding, “With me, clients have an opportunity to rediscover that early childhood feeling of total security” (37).

Adda Ísabella’s therapy sessions do not take up too much space in the book, however, as complications appear early on and the protagonist is too consumed by her own issues to get involved in other people’s problems.

Adda Ísabella’s husband and the father of her children, Hreinn Hrafn Haraldsson, with whom she no longer lives, features prominently in the first part of the book. With a tendency for both drinking and violence, he burns bridges wherever he goes, though he is a highly educated biologist searching for the “psychopath gene” and has frequently applied to work at a celebrated Icelandic research institution. Other characters include Adda Ísabella’s brother Ari Ferdinand; her children, Sæmundur Fróði and Hildur, plus the other residents of her block, taxi driver Eiríkur, and the Thorsteinsons, Lúðvík and Tony, a gay couple who enlist Adda to help them make their dream of having a child a reality. In her forties, Adda Ísabella becomes their surrogate, and the second half of the book primarily focuses on the surrogacy storyline.

 The story speaks directly to contemporary readers; set in 1999, it pokes fun at the frenzy surrounding the impending millennium. At a nightclub, Adda Ísabella is introduced to the “2000 people”:

 Sitting at her table are the curator of the year; her husband, CEO of the year; their son, marketing director of the year; his girlfriend, publicist of the year; her brother, media representative of the year; and his girlfriend, supermodel of the year (77).

 When Adda goes out partying, a group makeout session and fistfight break out, although she believes Hreinn Hrafn’s mood has improved and he “only resorts to violence in exceptional cases” (78).

 With the clear criticism of High Up on the North Ridge – in this case, criticism of self-centeredness and superficiality – Hlín sets a tone that will be echoed in her later works. Adda Ísabella is visited by a glossy fashion magazine, and Sæmundur Fróði holds up a camera after his father’s supposed death, intending to make a documentary about “the son’s experience in the first days after losing his father.” He also writes an obituary, which is much more like an introduction – an introduction to his own inner life.

High Up on the North Ridge is a comedy, a farce of sorts in the form of a novel. The energy is frenetic, the humour coarse. The story is populated by many characters – few of them scrupulous – cheating, separations, drinking binges, and other trouble. Suddenly, just like in a Greek tragedy, a choir appears in the middle of the story, when an earthquake shakes the country and the drunken biologist is swallowed up by the earth.

 The charade probably reaches its apex when Adda, seven months pregnant with the Thorsteinsons’ child, performs in a gospel music video. She appears on the front cover of the glossy magazine’s weekend edition, wielding a golden sceptre with the mountains in the background, the headline reading: “Surrogate Adda Ísabella grabs the world’s attention by playing God” (240). Originally, the plan was to broadcast the birth live, but the mother flees and gives birth in a barn, “far from civilisation”. The farcical escapades and staging clearly belie the theatrical influence found far and wide throughout Hlín Agnarsdóttir’s body of work.

 Fervent fools

 The Flowers from Mao (2009) opens during the so-called Pots and Pans Revolution, in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. Protagonist Sigurborg Eyfjörð is preparing to be interviewed by the Center for Oral History about her involvement in the Maoist movement in the 1970s. The Pots and Pans Revolution is in full swing, and Sigurborg, known as Bogga, “finally drag[s] herself down to Austurvöllur Square”, even though she feels she’s already done enough protesting for one lifetime. She notices a number of red flags in the sea of people and thinks, “I who thought everything red in this country was dead except the blood in the nation’s veins that had flowed as calmly as the River Don, certain that wealth was eternal” (11).

 Bogga compares these protests with protests of the past: “I cannot recall having felt such anger when we were making plans to revolutionise society, the Chairman and I. Our anger was like child’s play compared to the anger that was churning inside the protestors, bubbling up like a hot spring” (11).

 She takes notice of a young girl making her voice heard in the protests, discovers that the girl is a college student, and thinks, “A college student just like I was when I became a fervent fool in the Chairman’s court” (11). Among the throng she also spots Már, former chair of the Pro-China Proletariat Society, Maoists-Leninists, and starts reminiscing about the old days.

 When Bogga begins her social work programme at the university in 1974, she sees an advertisement for a Maoist reading circle and decides to join. The story centers on the Maoist movement and reaches a climax when the protagonist travels to China and gets to meet Chairman Mao himself. There’s also a secondary plotline in the story about Bogga’s paternity as well as that of her son.

 Bogga (who goes by her full name in the movement, as the chairman believes her nickname isn’t respectable enough) spends part of the Mao era living in a commune, which is not a positive experience. Some of the rules at the commune are terribly funny; one of the things she is ordered to do is to take down a painting by Nína Tryggvadóttir that she had hung up on her bedroom wall because “all abstract art is bourgeois nonsense and snobbery” according to the Chairman; he says art should depict the real lives of the proletariat:

 “So if I were in your shoes, Sigurborg, I would take down this painting of Nína’s. It is completely devoid of substance and doesn’t have anything to say. It doesn’t align with our views here and is in glaring contradiction to the everyman style of the place” (135).

 Much of The Flowers from Mao is laugh-out-loud funny. The Chairman takes himself and the movement so seriously that he has everyone involved adopt pseudonyms, just in case the KGB should discover their revolutionary plans.

 Bogga, whose pseudonym is Skotta, becomes vice chair of the movement and is encouraged to quit her studies. “If I were to continue college I would risk becoming a bourgeois, educated woman who wouldn’t be able to relate to the working women, and if I truly wanted to be part of the fight, I would immediately drop out of school and get a job working alongside Guðný in the laundry at the national hospital” (102).

 But the women’s liberation that the radical movement was meant to bring never materialises. Bogga discovers (in a rather tangible manner when she meets Mao) that the promise of feminine freedom was nothing more than empty words.

 There’s talk of “booting up the buzzword machine”, and there’s no lack of buzzwords swirling around the movement. When Andrés, Sigurborg’s old friend and a father figure to her, disbelievingly asks whether she has become a Maoist, Comrade Sigurborg answers smoothly, “Maoist and Maoist, let’s just say that I support the people’s republic in China rather than the revisionists in the Kremlin” (92).

 Andrés is the voice of reason, immediately pointing out that Mao is no different from the world’s other dictators and advising Bogga to abandon the proletariat romanticism.

 Bogga doesn’t manage to convince Andrés, who knows what he’s talking about, and when she leaves her meeting with him, she writes off her old friend by saying he has the “same bloody bourgeois ass as all the others who opposed the movement” (116).

 The true proletariat of the book are Bogga’s mother and grandmother, down-to-earth working women who have always fulfilled their duties and have no need to decorate their lives with snappy mottos. It turns out that empty words and the trappings of ideology form a foundation too shaky for Bogga and her associates to stand on for long.

 Hlín belongs to the ’68 generation and has previously written about it, including in the play Don’t Give Up, Guðmundur (1984). As in all her works, humour plays a significant role in The Flowers from Mao. The dedication in the front of the book is the poem “To the Fervent Fools” by Dagur Sigurðarson, which begins with the words, “O you who have been trapped / in a maze of well-thought-out nonsense / of your own making.”

 The economic crash resulted from the excesses of capitalism, and Bogga’s past was shaped by the excesses of leftist ideology, though the consequences of her former life were nothing compared to the crash. Perhaps fervent fools face the same risk regardless of their beliefs – the risk of becoming trapped by the nonsense.

 Solving the senior citizen problem

 Hilda’s Game (2020) is a dystopian tale that describes the elder care industry of the near future. Arnhildur Adamsdóttir, who demands to be called Hilda, is an older woman struggling to evade the clutches of Futura Eterna. The private company offers “a permanent solution to the senior problem”, a turn of phrase that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the “final solution to the Jewish question” that was organised and carried out across the European continent not all that long ago. With its stately name, the company specialises in tidily dealing with the nation’s senior citizens so that neither their family members nor the government have to look after them – and certainly don’t have to spend money on them.

 The narrator is creative writing student Bragi Austan, who started out as a household aide to Hilda and eventually moved in with her. Hilda has three children, but it is her son Gunnar and daughter-in-law Jóhanna who feature most prominently in the story, as they encourage Hilda to follow the path that Future Eterna has laid out for those who have reached Survival Age. The company has the power to interfere in people’s lives; as it has been calculated that an individual of this age needs just twelve square metres’ living space, seniors are ordered to move into the so-called “senior sphere”. Hilda, who chooses to continue living in her spacious flat, has received several warnings from Futura Eterna and is supposed to pay a fine for all those extra square metres she’s occupying.

 Everyone prefers docile, manageable elders, but Hilda is neither docile nor easily managed. When her friend Baldur, who she met online and with whom she has had some exciting adventures, injures himself and ends up in Futura Eterna’s Final Ward (because of course the company decides when someone’s life should end), Hilda springs into action.

 The image of the future that Hlín conjures in Hilda’s Game is certainly bleak, but we can identify certain tendencies in that direction in today’s world. In interviews, for instance, Hlín has said that the inspiration for the story came from witnessing her own ailing elderly mother fight to decide her own living arrangements.

 In today’s capitalistic world, everything is expected to turn a profit – and the language the company has created, reminiscent of George Orwell’s Newspeak, is intended to obscure the true meaning of words, to gloss over, to throw dust in people’s eyes. Future Eterna’s rules and regulations, with their euphemistic wording, make it sound like the company simply wants to help the elderly live out their golden years without worry, when in reality the goal is to kill them when it is no longer worth keeping them alive; that is, when they cease to be profitable.

 The story harshly criticises capitalism, the establishment, and those who buy into what Futura Eterna and its owner, Oddur Oddsson, are selling. Those who accept that “this is just how things are now” and think they are mere cogs in the machine, powerless to change things. Hilda’s son Gunnar is a meek follower, but his wife Jóhanna is another story; she fights Hilda with all her power and can’t stand Hilda’s strong will and desire to live. After all, Jóhanna, as an employee of the Ministry of Welfare, is part of “the system”.

 In Hilda’s Game, Hlín does what she does best – exposing hypocrisy and duplicity with wry wit and biting humour.

 The man upstairs and the woman downstairs 

 Oversights (2022) is a “short story cycle about terrifying closeness” released exclusively by Storytel. The stories, which are interconnected, centre on interactions between the sexes and always feature some sort of abuse.

 In the first story, “Sudden Storm”, a man comes across a naked woman who has been attacked. He picks her up in his car and takes care of her, and the circumstances create a peculiar closeness between the two strangers. In “Reunion”, a woman living abroad returns to Iceland to bury her mother. She has some unfinished business from her past, having been sexually abused at a young age. Shortly after arriving in Iceland, she encounters a man she has spent half her life trying to forget. In the story “The Final Work”, we meet an adulterer extraordinaire who speaks with exaggerated eloquence about the women in his life and his own greatness. When he comes home and discovers his wife is nowhere to be found, he assumes she’s cheating on him, but that is far from the truth. “Homecoming”, the fourth story, centres on a reunion. A woman who disappeared without a trace many years earlier suddenly shows up and gets in touch with her old boyfriend. She has clearly had some difficult experiences and is struggling to regain her footing. The final story, “The Man Upstairs”, tells of “the woman downstairs”, a woman who lives in the basement of a man who uses her whenever it suits him. When a better option presents itself, she becomes not only the “the woman downstairs” but the lower woman, the lesser choice. She lets people take advantage of her and always goes back to the man, even listening as he makes love to his new girlfriend after having prepared herself to move in with him.

 Many different kinds of abuse show up in these stories, with deep and serious consequences. Unfortunately, not every story ends with the woman managing to escape her abuser.

 After you left

 Letting Life Come True (2003), subtitled A Companion’s Story, is autobiographical, one of two such works in Hlín’s oeuvre. In this one, she writes about her relationship with Þorvaldur, with whom she lived off and on for 16 years. Þorvaldur is an alcoholic, and when the book opens, Hlín is at his side as he is on his deathbed at just 45 years of age. She was his counterpart, consumed by co-dependency.

 The man in my life became the alcoholic in my life and I became the partner of an alcoholic whether I liked it or not. In my relationship with him, I was constantly running from myself, pitching myself headfirst into his life, his chaos. I could forget that my own soul was in turmoil by keeping myself busy picking up the pieces of his. Two grown children had met, two incompetent children who didn’t know how to cope with adult life. (15)

 Once Þorvaldur is gone, the story turns to the past, recounting the couple’s relationship from the beginning. The narrative is interrupted by various facts about relevant topics – alcoholism and unhealthy relationships. Hlín skilfully weaves together world literature with her own experiences. She examines the alcoholic Puntila and co-dependent Matti in the play Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti by Bertolt Brecht and tells the story of her grandfather the wrestler; he was also an alcoholic, and she lived with him as a teenager. Magnús í Bræðratungu from Iceland’s Bell, Greek myths/tragedies, and Alcoholics Anonymous are also mentioned. 

 The book also includes snippets of letters the lovers sent to each other and part of a text that Hlín calls After You Left, a grief journal of sorts that she wrote after Þorvaldur’s death:

 I stand by every word. I loved you, despite your mistakes, addiction, wretchedness, misery, drinking, prison sentence, bankruptcy, debts, and, at the end, illness, for as Kirkegaard says in Works of Love, there’s a person behind it all. There’s a person behind the addict, the criminal, the lawyer, the judge, the doctor. And that will forever be where I start when I consider other people, because you are in all of them and they in you. Unum noris omnes. (120)

 There is great conflict and deep emotions contained in the pages of this book. Understanding of circumstances and reconciliation: We were sick and couldn’t do any better. But there is also humour in the retrospection. When a mature woman who has “worked through her issues” looks back, she can laugh good-naturedly at her own credulity and the whole damn mess. It’s an appealing tone that makes the book highly enjoyable despite all the grief and pain.

 At the end of the book, Hlín writes that penning this book was “the final destination on the journey”, the personal reckoning of an individual who neglected her inner life all too long. It’s also clear that the author of Letting Life Come True has achieved a bit of distance from the material. Hlín is well aware of her own part in the duet, for instance, recognises that her instinct to control, her desire to “direct” Þorvaldur only complicated their relationship.

 It was incredible how long we could cling to one another, broken in our pain. And though he was the one suffering, I was his anguished co-star. When he fell off the wagon and turned back to the bottle, I fell off the wagon and turned back to him. (10)

 When Þorvaldur has burned all the bridges behind him and is all but at death’s door, he shows up at his ex’s home in a miserable state one night looking for a place to stay. In the morning, he leaves a note: “‘Forgive me. Things will be better in the fullness of time.’ The phrase about the fullness of time was an expression he often used to comfort himself and others when all hope seemed lost. But the fullness of time never came” (117).

 It is symbolic that Christina Rossetti’s poetry bookends the narrative, along with Þorvaldur’s death. Þorvaldur quotes Rossetti to Hlín at the beginning of the book: “When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me.” At the end of the book, the poem is repeated in Karl Guðmundsson’s Icelandic translation. And in between the poems is the story of a man’s death and the illness that caused it.

 A letter to her father

 At the end of the book Letting Life Come True, Hlín writes of receiving some advice from a Swedish friend while she was in the throes of grief: “Write a book about your father and you will understand yourself better”. It’s safe to say that Maidenhood (2021) is the book Hlín’s friend advised her to write.

 In Maidenhood, Hlín once again writes about her own life. Some of what was addressed about her childhood in Letting Life Come True is revisited, and the book then delves into her adolescence and adulthood. Hlín’s parents had both passed by the time the book came out – a fact that undoubtedly allowed her greater freedom of expression, though she did not exactly hold back on describing various aspects of her childhood in Letting Life Come True. The story is largely written in the second person, with Hlín directly addressing her father, as in Kafka’s Letter to His Father. Hlín is well aware of the parallel and in fact refers to Kafka multiple times throughout the book. Indeed, both fathers are overpowering and all-consuming figures.

 She always meant to write you a letter, tell you she loved you, tell you she hated you, tell you who she was, that she could see right through you, that she was different, that she was beautiful, that she was hurting. She wanted to give you a piece of her mind, tell you that you were ugly, that you were cruel, that she wanted a father, that the paternal act you put on was unconvincing, and the clown act too. Yes, she always meant to write you a letter, like Kafka, to ask whether you truly believed you were God’s equal. (11) 

 The book opens with Hlín getting the call that her father is dying, a clear parallel to Letting Life Come True, which opens with the death of Þorvaldur, Hlín’s partner of many years. Both books are a reckoning of sorts – in one, the author confronts her childhood, and in the other, her great love. Both are written to explain, to name, and both begin at the end of a chapter, as two different men make their exits and Hlín is left alone to survey the changed landscape of her life.

 In the chapter “Monologue on the Contents of This Letter”, Hlín says that she’s writing the letter she always intended to write, though she never knew where to send it. In reality, she and her father never truly knew each other, and in order to understand the mystery, she must allow herself to use her imagination: “Without art, it would be impossible to express that which can barely be understood” (11).

 Hlín’s identification with Franz Kafka continues. She describes how shocked she was when she read The Metamorphosis for the first time in her youth. She felt the story was about her and her father, and she sees herself in the character of Gregor Samsa without understanding why. It is not until much later, after “many years and expensive therapy sessions”, that she finally understands, “when I have tried to make something of myself after years of my father’s disparaging voice endlessly echoing in my head, telling me I’m nothing, that education is useless, that I shouldn’t think I’ll ever get ahead in this earthly life” (13).

 Maidenhood’s subtitle identifies it as a true story. Hlín recalls her childhood but actually begins the story before her birth, imagining her parents’ thoughts and inner lives. The story is written with a deep desire to understand what drove her parents as well as a desire for self-understanding. Why did Hlín become who she is today?

 The book candidly describes the environment in which children grew up not too many decades ago, when it was not customary to listen to children. They were made to watch younger children and take on far too much responsibility but had no real say in their own lives. Young Hlín feels the sting of injustice and not infrequently lands herself in trouble for running her mouth; for instance, she is once beaten in school for pointing out that a teacher who greatly emphasises the importance of punctuality often shows up late herself. It is not just Hlín’s father who seeks to discipline her, to chastise – it’s the patriarchy, and young Hlín encounters it in a variety of guises in her childhood.

 Maidenhood is a coming-of-age story about how a girl becomes a young woman and of the greatest obstacles she faces along the way. Certain aspects of the narrator’s personality are clear from an early age. She seems to have an inherently rebellious spirit and cannot accept the military discipline and injustice she encounters in her home. She is encouraged to work hard (one must work hard and do one’s part) and she becomes an unstoppable powerhouse. Early on, she’s already entertaining others with jokes, bits, and physical feats and even goes a bit too far with her inclination for telling stories when she tells a country boy bald-faced lies about being friends with the Beatles in a delightful chapter set in the countryside.

 The father’s presence is felt throughout the book. The reader, immersed in young Hlín’s adventures, is startled when she suddenly addresses her father now and then: “You who know so little of my young self and don’t remember anything anymore, of course, because you’re dead – do you remember the summer she was staying in the Shadow District?” (53). The book goes on to describe a trauma that the child experiences and tells her father about, but he’s too focused on other things to listen to her.

 The book’s title, Maidenhood, is reflected in a chapter in which the narrator, nearly sixteen years old, loses her virginity at Gljúfrasteinn, home of celebrated Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness, where she was at a party with her friend, Laxness’ daughter. Given that the teenage girl will go on to become a writer, it seems an appropriate setting for such a milestone in her life.

 Not bad at all, for it is not just a literal loss of virginity at the most iconic home of culture in the country, but a loss of innocence. I’m bidding farewell to my miserable childhood and stepping into freedom and rebellion. (159)

 Hlín is a changed person after that night at Gljúfrasteinn, and shortly thereafter she is kicked out of her parents’ house after a fight. “It’s the same tune that has echoed around me all throughout my childhood. Endless criticism of my appearance, my mood, my person. I am good for nothing” (163). A short while later: “I am an interloper and should not exist” (166). Gregor Samsa has left home.

 Humour in conflict

 Women’s lives are a topic close to Hlín’s heart, as the short story cycle Oversights demonstrates. In The Flowers from Mao, she writes about men in the radical left movement who, despite giving tremendous lip service to notions of equality, did not trust themselves to “watch” their children or change diapers and called women sluts for listening to their desires. In Maidenhood, she conjures a bleak picture of her childhood, highlighting things that would have certainly been different had she not been a girl and painting in stark colours the military-like control of the patriarchy that everyone went along with until they’d finally had enough: “In this society, there was no room for women’s voices, let alone children’s” (Maidenhood, 12).

 Hlín is a critical author. She frequently critiques hypocrisy and duplicity – and nowhere is that more noticeable than in The Flowers from Mao, in which the sanctimonious movement reveals itself as false when the “true working class” are all but invisible among their ranks. In Hilda’s Game, Hlín critiques the capitalistic tendency to toss aside anything that is not profitable – and care little for human lives and feelings, though everything should be perfect on the surface. The self-centred, substance-devoid glossy image games of the media (High Up on the North Ridge) also inspire her writing.

 Hlín’s search for knowing is a common theme in all her work. The need to explain and define, to work through. Humour is one of the hallmarks of that search for knowing, and the humour takes many forms. The farcical antics in some of her theatre works and the almost grotesque, vulgar characters in High Up on the North Ridge. Sarcasm and irony feature prominently in The Flowers from Mao. Hlín writes as an enlightened woman who can look to the past and laugh at the nonsense.

 Autobiographical creative nonfiction can certainly be challenging at times, but Hlín is generally prepared to laugh at herself and her circumstances, which is an appealing trait. The humour in Letting Life Come Trueand Maidenhood is more tempered and delicate than in her other works and often centres around laughing at the difference between what she knows now and what her younger self knew then.

 In some way, Hlín is always entertaining people. Each of her books contains a large dose of humour. Sometimes it is more prominent, sometimes less, but it is always present.

 Hlín was nearly fifty when her first novel came out, and she has been prolific ever since. She has steadily penned plays throughout her career and always has one foot in the theatre world, as a playwright and director. And her novels bear clear evidence of that theatrical influence. Pure staging – almost as though she’s producing a farce – as in High Up on the North Ridge. In her autobiographical works, theatrical literature is referenced frequently. Bertolt Brecht’s Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti forms part of the backdrop of Letting Life Come True and is referenced more than once. In Maidenhood, Hlín likens her father to Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Hlín Agnarsdóttir’s career is firmly rooted in drama, and her work contains a multitude of threads that, when pulled, lead right back to the theatre. 

Translated by Julie R. Summers

November 2023