A FIST OR A HEART

In award-winning Icelandic novelist Eiríksdóttir’s English-language debut, an older woman fixates on a young playwriting prodigy, and both women come to the realization that they are linked by shared trauma in their pasts.

Elín Jónsdóttir is a woman in her late 60s living alone in Reykjavík. She makes her living creating props—severed limbs and decaying corpses, especially—for the theater and Nordic crime films. Elín crosses paths with Ellen Álfsdóttir, the 19-year-old daughter of famed playwright Alfur Finnsson and author of a new play that’s garnering a lot of buzz. This atmospheric, disorienting tale is narrated by Elín, who says “the reason I decided to write this is that if I don’t, no one will,” and that it's “an attempt to connect signs that were conveyed in waking life and in dreams.” Elín, who had a difficult childhood, has spent her adulthood pushing others away. She claims that she “[can] see feigð, someone’s death approaching.” Long ago, she “accidentally got mixed up in the most salacious story of them all”: one involving Ellen’s philandering father, who was discovered dead halfway between his wife’s house and that of his mistress—Ellen's mother. Elín’s work in the theater brings her close to Ellen, and she spies on the young woman and her artist mother. “The people I wanted to get to know were far beyond my reach,” Elín confesses, and the unexpected delivery of boxes full of memorabilia from her dead grandmother’s house forces her to recall that she has obsessed over others before with traumatic and tragic results. As Ellen’s play is produced and Elín circles closer to the girl, she finally acknowledges the spell she’s under and that “trauma is, of course, nothing but an enchantment.”

A dreamlike meditation on isolation and the bone-aching desire for companionship.