“Get to work!” cried Audur Ava Olafsdottir when she found herself, like her 350,000 compatriots, stranded on her island in 2020 due to the pandemic. Or “to the birches!”, as the heroine of her 8th novel would say, Eden, who will work hard to grow these trees on his volcanic lands. In 2020, the Icelandic author of Rosa Candida (2010) had also just left her position as professor of art history at the University of Reykjavik, so she had plenty of time to write (a trilogy) and… cook. It is in impeccable French that Miss Olafsdottir tells us all this during a visit to Paris at the end of autumn. The novelist is gifted with languages it seems, since she can speak equally well in Italian, Norwegian, Danish, English… Hence, among other things, the flow of invitations that come to her from all over the world . Hence, also, the 16 trips abroad made in 2019. Hence, finally, her guilt as a bad ecological student with such a carbon footprint.
“Today, I’m trying to be a little more responsible, to group trips together…” says the citizen of a country particularly affected by climate change, between the numerous (and new) summer storms and the melting of the glaciers (which retreat 200 meters each year). Language, ecology, nature and immigration: we find all these concerns in the formidable Edendistilled with the customary finesse and lightness of the author of Miss Iceland.
To illustrate her ode to the Icelandic language, Audur Ava chose as narrator a linguist specializing in endangered minority languages. Alba, it is she, has just returned from a distant conference when the novel opens. We covered subjects as diverse as the virtual disappearance of the subjunctive in the Faroese language, the place of the verb in Breton in the 17th century or even the threat of disappearance weighing on an Amazonian idiom due to the destruction of forests. Behind these apparently Lilliputian themes, there are in reality very serious concerns, because, as the author confirms to us, “if the hegemony of English persists, we will have lost 90% of the world’s languages by the turn of this year. century”.
The same word to say “the world” and “at home”
But here is Alba back in Iceland, this country where there are a hundred words to describe the wind and at least as many to describe the snow. This country, Audur Ava Olafsdottir mischievously argues, whose “language could replace English as the universal language, because, to my knowledge, Icelandic is the only language that uses the same word to say ‘the world’ and ‘home ‘, which means that we are at home everywhere.
Just like her creator, Alba thinks about all her travels and the number of trees she would have to raise to offset her carbon footprint: 5,600! The idea is gaining ground. She soon acquired a large piece of land in the countryside and began her “reconversion”, starting with the planting of birch trees – the rare trees that manage to grow on volcanic soil. Then she relieved herself of her work as a researcher at the university and of all her scholarly works which she gave to the village Red Cross center. Miracle: they go like hot cakes. “I had fun imagining that linguistics and grammar would interest people more than thrillers,” confides the novelist who, at the same time, gently attacks the fashion for thrillers in her country (even senior civil servants and politicians). indulge in it, like the current Prime Minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir): “Honestly, I think they all look a bit alike…”
In this same village, Alba also meets Danyel and her fake plumber uncle, refugees from a distant country at war. The opportunity to talk about these asylum seekers (Ukrainians, Venezuelans, etc.) who pose no problem in this country with non-existent unemployment but who are often put off by the language (and its 600,000 words) and the long winter night. The false uncle will leave, Danyel will stay with Alba as a foster family. It is on this note of hope that this beautiful novel ends, with its assumed and joyful fantasy.
Eden, by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, trans. from Icelandic by Eric Boury. Zulma, 256 p., €21.50.
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