ANIMAL LIFE

An Icelandic midwife, from a long line of midwives, tries to decipher the meaning of the unpublished manuscripts her beloved great-aunt and mentor left in her care before dying.

The week before Christmas, Iceland braces for a storm of frightening proportions. Alone in the apartment she inherited from grandaunt Fífa, Dýja takes phone calls from her meteorologist sister about the increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change, strikes up a limited but potentially flirtatious relationship with an Australian tourist renting the apartment upstairs, and fixes up Fífa’s run-down flat with the help of a younger midwife. But rudimentary plot aside, the real focus of the book is on Dýja’s ruminations about her own and Fífa’s belief systems about life and death. Tellingly, Dýja, who gave up theology for midwifery, reveals that midwife means “mother of light” in Icelandic, and it's considered "the most beautiful word in our language"; in rather obvious contrast, her parents run a funeral home. Childless women devoted to delivering other women’s babies, Dýja and Fífa see themselves and the world around them with concrete, spare objectivity that readers may find either refreshing or off-putting. Emotions are not discussed and only rarely acknowledged. Instead, this slim novel packs in a lot of factual information, from the sex life of bonobos to the worldwide death rate of women in childbirth—830 a day! Midwifery is the subject but also the metaphor, as is Iceland itself, a nation where people value light since it’s in short supply. Dýja struggles to decide if Fífa’s three manuscripts, shared in snippets, are drafts covering a main theme from different angles or separate entities. Certainly, Fífa seems ahead of her time as she rails against man’s effect on Earth’s survival in the 20th century. Although sexual relationships are mentioned, how they fit into each woman’s life remains mysterious. Both women emphasize the noun man throughout, and it is pointedly vague whether Fífa includes women when she voices her belief that man is inferior to other animals.

Like her characters, Ólafsdóttir’s novel is emotionally chilly while intellectually passionate.