Eva Rún Snorradóttir

“My substance is older women,” admits the anonymous woman who serves as the novel’s first-person narrator on the very first page of Eldri konur (Older Women, not translated into English): “that which makes me whole, that fills me with strength and with life, that makes me writhe with withdrawal and compulsive longing, that makes me lash out and strike, that drives me headlong in-to ruin.”

Each chapter thereafter is devoted to describing one or more women and the relationship the narrator has with each of them. They are colleagues and acquaintances, trainers and lovers, and her relationships with them are without exception built on her relentless longing for older women. The true object of this longing, however, is likely more complex than the book’s title suggests.

As the narrative unfolds, a picture emerges of the narrator’s life from the age of five until she turns forty. The women who occupy her entire mind during different phases of her life are usually at the centre of the story. Only in the background do we glimpse the basic elements of what might be called an ordinary life: long-term relationships, children being born, and even a fairly ambitious career. In this way, the text is focused through the narrator’s compulsive thoughts, while at the same time “queering” traditional norms for how women’s life stories are told.

Without much effort, one can read between the lines that the narrator’s problems have their roots in a lack of contact with her parents during childhood. Everything relating to her relationship with her mother constitutes a striking lacuna in the narrative. She grows up with an aunt who is under the close supervision of the child protection authorities, consumes large amounts of alcohol, and periodically serves time in prison, but who is nevertheless “not quite as awful as her mother”, as the child is told by the adults.

As the story approaches the present day, however, it becomes clear that working on oneself or having a sincere desire to do well is not always enough. Although the narrator begins to understand her own problems and recognise the patterns of behaviour to avoid in order not to lose her sanity, she nevertheless continues to lose her way in life for a long time. She has grown accustomed to rejection, guilt and shame, and it is towards these states that she gravitates when things are at their most difficult.

This contradictory condition is conveyed with a paradoxical lightness in the book’s depiction of the narrator’s crooked progress through life. Gradually, one begins to suspect that the wry text is not entirely reliable. Is the narrator’s self-annihilating satire to be read as a way of drawing closer to the reader, or as a means of keeping them at a safe distance? Even though the story clearly bears witness to a desire to work on herself, much suggests that the narrator also uses her “self-work tools” to keep her problems alive.

Eldri konur is a story about a life lived on the margins. The protagonist’s marginalisation, however, is due neither to her homosexuality nor to her social class – although both play a certain role – but to the shame she carries with her, which makes it impossible for her to experience intimacy and healthy emotional relationships. Her almost non-existent self-respect challenges the reliability of the narrative and draws attention to the abyss that opens up between the story we tell about ourselves and the one that is evident in the eyes of others. The result is a dizzying study of humiliation and dignity as opposing forces within the human psyche.

Eva Rún Snorradóttir (b. 1982) is an author, poet, and performance artist. Over the past ten years, she has attracted attention for experimental works that usually deal with old wounds and the ways in which people come to terms with difficult experiences. A common thread in her writing is queerness in a broad sense, often set against the difficulties of living in what she has described as “the deep sea of normality”. Her first poetry collection was published in 2013, and she has since written two further poetry collections and three works of prose, in addition to writing scripts and directing for the stage and for radio.