Hotel Silence
We are still separated by three floorboards, massive pinewood from the surrounding forest, which is carpeted with mines, each floorboard is thirty centimetres wide, with intermittent gaps, and I stretch out my arms, groping towards her like a blind man trying to catch his bearings. First I reach the surface of the body, the skin, a streak of moonlight caressing her back through a slit between the curtains. She takes one step towards me, I step on a creaking floorboard. And she also holds out her hand, measuring palm against palm, lifeline against lifeline, and I feel a turbulence gushing through my carotid artery and also a pulsation in my knees and arms, how the blood flows from organ to organ. Leaf-patterned wallpaper adorns the walls around the bed in room eleven of Hotel Silence and I think to myself, tomorrow I'll start to sandpaper and polish the floor.
The above passage is from the first page of Hotel Silence, so although it contains a spoiler of sorts, I guess that's the point: Author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir has decided to begin with the resolution of her plot's conflict, and then the story rewinds to a few weeks earlier, when our main character is experiencing an existential crisis. And it all works fabulously. The plot is interesting but sparse; the characters are soft spoken but fully revealed; the themes are deep but subtly handled. I have never read an Icelandic author before, but the quiet tone and scant ornamentation of the writing here seems wholly in keeping with what I know of the Icelandic landscape. This read leaves me hungry for more of the same.
Is there something I still long to experience? Nothing I can think of. I have held a newborn slimy red baby, chopped down a Christmas tree in the woods in December, taught a child to ride a bike, changed a tire up on a mountain road alone at night in a snowstorm, braided my daughter's hair, driven through a polluted valley full of factories abroad, rattled in the rear carriage of a small train, boiled potatoes on a Primus in a coal-black sand desert, wrestled with the truth under long and short shadows, and I know that a man both cries and laughs, that he suffers and loves, that he possesses a thumb and writes poems, and I know that a man knows that he is mortal. What's left? To hear the chirp of a nightingale? To eat a white dove?
Approaching his fiftieth birthday and newly divorced, Jónas Ebeneser can no longer see much reason for living. Ever since his father died when he was in his first year of university (which precipitated Jónas dropping out to run the family business), Jónas had found meaning in taking care of/acting as the handyman for the women in his life; but now with his wife gone, his twenty-six-year-old daughter fully independent, and his mother suffering dementia in a nursing home, Jónas recognises that he has not made a big impact on the world and it would continue to spin without him. He doesn't come across as particularly depressed or delusional, Jónas is simply done with living. Not wanting his daughter to be the one to find his body if he went by self-inflicted-shotgun or dangling rope, Jónas decides to travel to a recently war-torn country (never named, but seems Balkan); maybe if he steps on a landmine or encounters a sniper's bullet, his daughter will never even know his intent. But when Jónas checks into the formerly opulent Hotel Silence and meets the twenty-something brother and sister trying to keep it going, he is forced to recognise what real pain looks like:
If we were to sit down, me and this young woman in pink sneakers, and compare our scars, our maimed bodies, and count how many stitches had been sewn from the neck down, and then draw a line between them and add them all up, she would be the winner. My scratches are insignificant, laughable. Even if I had lance wounds in my side, the girl would win the prize.
Starting with some small repairs around the hotel, Jónas is eventually enlisted as a handyman for the whole village; and in the process of mending a town, he mends himself. And I know that sounds trite and hokey, but it's really not: Ólafsdóttir tells you right on page one that Jónas is still alive and making a human connection after the date he had chosen for his expiration, so this novel is meant to be more about the why than the what. And the fact that Ólafsdóttir packs so much relatable meaning into the why, in what is ultimately just a few hours' read, makes for a moving and technically exquisite read.
