Miss Iceland

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Miss Iceland ( Icelandic: Ungfrú Ísland) is a 2018 novel by award-winning novelist Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Men themselves, stripped down to their sexist core, seem not so different after all despite the span of six decades. The gender wage gap has only shrunk by about 20 percent in the past half century (and that’s going by the most generous estimates).

What might be lost if Icelandic fades away is Iceland’s unique and powerful literary culture — the medieval sagas, the poetry of its many poets and the novels of authors like Halldor Laxness, one of my favorites. Society men would prefer Hekla to raise her skirt above her knees and doll herself up, rather than wear comfy trousers. Miss Iceland, through both its gripping language and its romantic execution, leads us to believe that Hekla is our hero, and that we will follow her into greatness. She has a good woman friend with whom she grew up but this friend is now trapped in marriage and motherhood.

Helka, trying to make it in the big city, a woman in 1960’s Reykjavik weighed down by expectation and constraint.

When he finally makes it to Denmark he discovers that although there are clubs where men dance together, they are still raided by Danish police.Born and raised in Iceland, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir currently resides in Reykjavík where she is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Iceland.

Hekla’s other best friend, David Jon John Johnsson (Jon), is an important character in his own right. Miss Icelandis divided up into bite-sized chapters of just a few pages, and each one dives around Reykjavik, from Hekla’s workplace to her friends’ apartments, to time spent with the poet.e., Ólafsdóttir literally means ‘Olaf’s daughter’), it is appropriate to refer to Auður by her first name. Other role models are offered by the bitter colleague or her ex-beauty queen friend, sent to warn Hekla.

The writing style is different from anything I've read before but I found it to be really engrossing. 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). I’ve been a book reviewer for a number of years and have posted hundreds of reviews on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. Each new novel by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir is like a meeting with a marvelous friend that immediately makes you feel like you have never parted.Jon John is gay in a hyper-masculine society and he gets sick of having to play a role and jumps ship to escape to Denmark. Ungfrú Ísland under the leadership of Manuela Osk Harðardóttir and Jorge Esteban, a new era is ushered in. What we get instead is a woman arriving in Reykjavik with an English copy of Ulysses and a manuscript of her own in her bag, only to come face-to-face with the crooked and unnecessary evils of the world. One is Isey, a woman who has settled down young and given into what she has accepted is a woman’s lot in life: that of a wife and mother. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.