In 60s Iceland women waitresses are routinely fondled and, overall, have little opportunity in this misogynistic culture.

Men only want to sleep with me when they’re drunk, they don’t want to talk afterwords and be friends. The winner was 21 year old Elísabet Hulda Snorradóttir, a second year student at the University of Iceland, majoring in Chinese Studies. The 2020 Miss Universe Iceland competition was held on Friday, October 23, 2020, at Gamla Bio in downtown Reykjavik. Upon her arrival, a man tries to recruit her to join the Miss Iceland competition; she refuses, and also keeps her literary aspirations to herself. He is arrogant and does not see the world how Hekla does; he is a man of privilege who cannot see it.It’s a beautifully written, tightly translated, quickly paced tale about good people in a bad world. She’s fully aware of both the virulent sexism of her society and the ridiculousness of the patriarchy it serves. Jon John is a secondary character but plays a large role in Hekla’s life, and the author verbosely describes his struggles as a gay man trying to find happiness and fulfillment but only seems to discover torment. I felt like many characters were limited in their lives both by the societal norms/expectations but also by their own fears or inability to risk change. I liked the matter of fact presentation of behaviours of different characters without judgement which nonetheless made it oh so clear where the morality of this world sits.

The stunning, stark landscapes aside, it was pure fluke that I arrived at the beginning of Pride Week, and downtown Reykjavik was awash in rainbow-coloured pennants and banners. Hekla’s father is obsessed with volcanoes (he named her after one, in spite of her mother’s pleas to the contrary) and whenever a new one erupts (which in Iceland is frequent) he drops everything to go watch. I recently read and reviewed Ólafsdóttir’s second novel, Butterflies in November, ( you can read that review here), and her fifth novel Hotel Silence ( you can read that review here).Those who might think the author chose the easy way out – setting her novel in the ’60s, so as not to disturb the sensibilities of contemporary ‘woke’ men – would be mistaken. As in her other novels, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir paints an authentic picture of Iceland, this time as it was in the early 1960s. There is Hekla's father, who ponders life by writing about the impact of the weather on people and the natural world (how Icelandic is that? She is the author of six novels, a collection of poetry and four plays that have been performed at the National Theatre in Iceland and at the Reykjavik City Theatre. In Iceland another volcano erupts and Hekla meets a poet who brings to light harsh realities about her art.

Such great writing here, poetic and raw in places Only a great book can make you feel you're really there, a thousand miles and a generation away. Helka, trying to make it in the big city, a woman in 1960's Reykjavik weighed down by expectation and constraint.

But the marvelous irony is that, yes, Hekla does get her story, her observations of Iceland, Denmark and the people around her, her feelings and her sense of dedication out into the world. She moves in with her friend Jon, a gay man who longs to work in the theatre, but can only find dangerous, backbreaking work on fishing trawlers. Her earlier novel, The Greenhouse (2007), won the DV Culture Award for literature and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award.

The book cover has no visible wear, and the dust jacket (if applicable) is included for hard covers. I know a lot of you have such a love for this magical place so I just wanted to come here and share this. The period setting allows its author — award-winning novelist, playwright, poet and art history professor Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir — to achieve a delicate and clever balance. This book is the story of every woman full to bursting with artistic expression and marvellous potential who is quashed by meaningless patriarchal rules born out of fear, hate, aggression, and sadism. Hekla and Jon John ultimately escape to Copenhagen and then to an undisclosed location in the south but find things only marginally better.Hekla’s kinship with Jón John grows from their shared feelings of alienation: hers from the Reykjavik poet café crowd and his from the masculine atmosphere on a recent trawler expedition. The male poets who gather nightly in the cafes and bars to pose and posture seem little different from 21st century hipster bros. And yet Hekla is also our own Miss Iceland, a young woman who would represent the female voices of Iceland in print through art and poetry, if only she could.