Review: 'A Fist or a Heart' by Kristín Eiríksdóttir, trans. by Larissa Kyzer

I work with Old Norse literature on a daily basis, which means I'm weirdly familiar with Iceland, just not the Iceland of today. In order to get to know the country a little better I wanted to read some of its modern literature as well, which brought me to A Fist or a Heart. Thanks to AmazonCrossing and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay in reviewing!

Pub. Date: 9/24/2019
Publisher: AmazonCrossing

The past returns with a fury for a woman coming to terms with her life in this award-winning novel by an acclaimed Icelandic author making her English-language debut.

Elín Jónsdóttir lives an isolated existence in Reykjavík, Iceland, making props and prosthetics for theatrical productions and Nordic crime flicks. In her early seventies, she has recently become fascinated with another loner, Ellen Álfsdóttir, a sensitive young playwright and illegitimate daughter of a famous writer. The girl has aroused maternal feelings in Elín, but she has also stirred discomfiting memories long packed away. Because their paths have crossed before. One doesn’t remember. The other is about to forget.

Soon they’ll discover all they have in common: difficult childhoods, trauma, and being outliers who have found space to breathe in creative expression. Yet the more Elín tries to connect with the young woman and unbox painful memories, the more tenuous her grasp on reality becomes.

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, A Fist or a Heart is a gripping, artfully interwoven novel of power, secrets, and isolation by one of the most bracing and original voices of the author’s generation.

I am fascinated by novels in which age and youth meet. In A Fist or a Heart, Elín and Ellen are clearly set up as two sides of a coin, or rather perhaps to halves of a whole. Even their names link them and throughout the novel we learn of more and more points on which the two and their life experiences match. Where Elín is looking back, giving the reader insight into how she was shaped by her experiences but how she also shapes her own life by very strict ideas, Ellen is at the very beginning of life and is still figuring out which outside forces are shaping her. In contrasting the two, Eiríksdóttir attempts to speak to larger truths about humanity but also about women. No one can escape the influence of others on them, no one can help but be shaped by their environment. This is true for all the characters in A Fist or a Heart, but it seems to echo extra strongly for these two women. On the one hand they feel like uprooted women, hardly connected to reality or everyday life. On the other hand, they are marked, time and time again, by the choices and acts of others which express themselves through different kinds of psychological and emotional violence. I find it hard to put into words what the impact of this was on me as a reader, but A Fist or a Heart has definitely left its own kind of mark.

Elín is in her seventies and, as she works away on props and prostethics, she contemplates her life. The impetus for this comtemplation is her encounter with a young woman, Ellen, daughter of a famous author and author herself of a new play for which Elín is making a prop. The two women's lives swirl around each other, creating something of a vortex of trauma, insight, pain, creation, and more. The novel is technically told through Elín's perspective, who tells us from the beginning that she isn't the most reliable narrator and that she doesn't quite know how to formulate this story. Her chapters are written in first person and these really bring her struggles to the fore. We also get a deep insight into Ellen as well through the third person, but I always questioned these chapters as I felt Elín's presence throughout them. A Fist or a Heart is not an easy read by any standard. Both Elín and Ellen have deeply difficult lives, marked by longing and abandonment, difficult relationships to fathers and mothers, and a tenuous grasp on reality. Some elements of the novel are quite hard to read, in what they hint at or actively explore, but because of this one does really get the feeling that something is being excavated. The ending feels tragic and a lot of difficult scenes occur throughout the book, but the reading experience felt weirdly affirming to me.

This is my first novel by Kristín Eiríksdóttir but I am captivated by her writing style. This novel won various prices in Iceland and I'm not surprised. It is the first of her works to be translated into English and I do really hope it finds a wide audience, even if it is not a super approachable read. Like I mentioned above, the themes the novel works with are far from easy. The writing itself is utterly alive though and it can't help but draw the reader right into the maelstrom of Elín's and Ellen's lives. Especially towards the end of the novel, where age catches up with Elín and her grip on reality begins to fade, the writing captures her confusion and fear so vividly that I was utterly gripped. While the English title, A Fist or a Heart, comes from a part of the book that I loved, I am also intrigued by the novel's Icelandic title: Elín, ýmislegt" (Elín, miscellaneous). Elín has boxes lying around from her childhood, one of which contains "miscellaneous" things, apparently. It is a great title because it fits to how for both women their lives are this assortment of things they don't quite know what to do with. They are affected by it, but have no place for it. I'm going to be thinking about this novel for a long time and I hope that either my Icelandic gets good enough to read her novels in the original, or that more of her works will be translated. Larissa Kyzer's translation is excellent and the vividness of Eiríksdóttir's writing is brought across really well by her. 

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

A Fist or a Heart is a lyrical, direct, and sometimes mildly confusing novel which is gripping in its details and its themes.