There are maybe 400,000 speakers of Icelandic; for most international Internet content providers, it does not make sense to translate their products into Icelandic.

The book’s setting does more to reveal how little we’ve in fact progressed over the past half century. Her attempts to settle down in a big city and achieve her ambitions in a conservative world make for an absorbing, bittersweet tale. Reykjavik is both a gossipy town and a literary hotspot — everyone knows where Halldor Laxness lives and keeps an eye out for him. 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.It's a telling and hopeful image in this quietly mesmerizing, unsettling tale about attempting to rise from the chasms of difficult circumstances by harnessing the power of friendship and creative drive. In Iceland another volcano erupts and Hekla meets a poet who brings to light harsh realities about her art. Helka, trying to make it in the big city, a woman in 1960’s Reykjavik weighed down by expectation and constraint.

She and Hekla remain loyal friends but their exchanges underscore in poignant detail how marriage and motherhood have curtailed Isey’s opportunities. Though, this is a woman stretching her abilities; case in point: she is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in English. Once Hekla meets him, and their relationship deepens, Miss Iceland truly becomes an engaging and enraging story to ingest. As I have shared in other posts, I have gone on a bit of a reading spurt of her novels after our second trip to Iceland had to be cancelled due to COVID, and I have found the closest replacement possible by reading about this country. The genius of Miss Iceland is that it uses an elegant fictional narrative to establish in literary form a continuity between the sexist ’60s and the present day.Until then, however, we spend a little too much time with Jon John, who is less a character and more a mouthpiece for the queer community in the 1960s.

In previous books, Ms Audur Ava Olafsdottir occasionally relied too much on eccentric foibles and hare-brained antics. The only thing I didn't like was the ending of the book- I felt a bit frustrated by it, but I think that was because it wasn't a 'happily ever after' type scenario.It’s not just how the men at the dining room treat Hekla, but more importantly how her poet boyfriend treats her like she’s nothing but a pretty face and a muse. She has a good woman friend with whom she grew up but this friend is now trapped in marriage and motherhood. Society men would prefer Hekla to raise her skirt above her knees and doll herself up, rather than wear comfy trousers. Hotel Silence was the first novel that I’ve read by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and it was very different (review here).