Kristín Eiríksdóttir

Communication, stories and glass: Kristín Eiríksdóttir

Imagery of transformation

The symbols are obvious. The floor lamp is on fire. The kitchen floor is covered in spices. The radio turns itself on an buzzes. The lights flicker. Electricity becomes visible, thin neon fibres squirm around the room. One of the personal ads in the paper is in 3D:

Meat Town seeks fire psalms.

This is the opening of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s first book Meat Town, which was published in 2004. The book contains a story told through a series of prose passages, which begins with this advertisement. The protagonist is a young girl: Kata. She is suffering from bad dreams, which her boyfriend, Kalvin, tries to stop by removing all the heavy metal posters from the walls of their room. Although she knows it won’t help, she is glad that the posters are gone as she has “grown weary of all their guts, blood, spread eagle women and symbols of death” (13). Still, her mind is obsessed with meat—especially the above-mentioned ad from the Meat Town. The passages provide various scenes from the young couple’s life. Kata is pale from staying inside so much and is obsessed with yaks. Early in the book, there is a passage that describes her riding a yak that wanders the tundra in search of a herd. It is unclear if this is a dream or if it is the ad itself that is the dream. Overall, the passages describe a world that is very dreamlike and could even be said to be surreal—not the least as some of the descriptions tend towards hyperrealism. Literary scholar Anna Balakian, who has analysed the poetry of the surrealists, claims that the symbolism found in surreal poetry is defined by its rejection of single meaning. In this way, surrealist poems resemble labyrinths, their power to disturb resulting from their ability to “point in different directions at the same time” (Balakian 1986, 19).

The surrealists were fond of horror, and Kristín’s poetry often contains horror narratives that are fuelled by her constantly transforming imagery. Upon the book’s publication, Kristín was studying fine art at the Icelandic Academy of Arts. A defining characteristic of the writing is its improvisational imagery; how the imagery takes off and creates its own world. This world becomes very apparent in her descriptions of the Meat Town: “The Meat House itself is remote, its posts made of bone walls of flushed meat. Streams of blood trickle from the house, it breathes, swells and pulses” (34).

Here, the escalating imagery is rather literal. The same is true of the book’s final passage, where Kata has completely disappeared into the world that the imagery has created: “The horizon swells” and then a blood clot shoots

out of the ground and takes the shape of a small monster that quivers and opens its mouth to reveal small, sharp teeth. Everything turns red and the swelling horizon approaches fast, becoming denser. The blood monster turns into a puddle. The swelling surrounds me and turns into four walls, a floor and a ceiling.

She hears hoofbeats; the yak has returned: “Before I know it, I’m sitting on its back, cursed to forever roam through infinity with it” (42).

This playful imagery calls back to modernism and the avant-garde—which is not surprising as Kristín has worked with grass-roots collective Nýhil, who provide a classic example of the constant act of recycling that futurism has been going through since its heyday in the early decades of the last century.

Kristín’s approach to prose poetry feels fresh and powerful, and overall the book is an exceptional first work that still feels relevant today. It is worth noting that she is the daughter of poet Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir, so it is no surprise that her chosen literary form would be poetry.

Two years later, Kristín followed Meat Town with another book of prose poetry. Skin Coloured Wasteland was one of the five books published that year by Nýhil under the heading of Nordic Literature II. [Úlfhildur’s coverage of the series can be found here on the web.] Although the series may be categorised as poetry, the authors did their utmost to stretch and expand the term. In the summer of 2006, Benedikt Hjartarson covered the series in his instalments on radio show Víðsjá, highlighting the books’ connections with futurism and pointing out their innovative acts of recycling. He concluded that although there is nothing brand-new going on in the texts, it does not necessarily follow that the books’ contribution is insignificant, as recycling is in itself a creative force.

Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s book is the slimmest of these five volumes. The surreal influence is particularly prevalent, as Skin Coloured Wasteland tells the story of a woman who apparently lives in a very big and remote house, far away from civilization. Her husband has to travel by helicopter to and from the house, but even so the supermarket does not seem to be that far away—though perhaps it is all too true that supermarkets are never that far away from us. All sorts of motifs appear; the house is referred to as a palace and its inhabitants wear skin coloured crowns. Thriller elements are inserted into this fantastical setting, as the poet outlines “an extremely precise burglary plan for a diamond thief”. As with Meat Town, aspects of the horror genre can be found everywhere, and there are also various erotic elements, as both books are rather concerned with the physical aspects of the human body.

Just like in Meat Town, the poems have a hallucinogenic feel, which Balakian points out as one of the major hallmarks of surrealist poetry. As before, the imagery is powerful and has a life of its own. The dreamlike atmosphere and use of repetition create a powerful sense of intimacy. Heat and fire form an ongoing theme, as the house or palace seems to be situated in a desert:

We sit in plastic chairs sipping cocktails and watching the palace decorated with fire. The sun shines brightly in the centre of the sky. The top layer of your skin drips down your body and then layer after layer. You’re melting. Eventually there’s nothing left but your bone-white foundations, then I stick my fingers between your temporal bones and grope the inside of your head. Find a tiny, leprous Indian and set it free. (25)

At first glance it might seem that the palace is burning, but this is not the case; it is still standing two pages later. The melting is also not permanent, as the man takes the woman to the supermarket on the next page. He puts a collar on her and she can’t help but howl. In this way, physical destruction is shown to be both haphazard and non-permanent.

Meat Town and Skin Coloured Wasteland both look at aspects of communication within a relationship or marriage. The communication is marked by conflict, which is mirrored in the horror imagery—although it is an oversimplification to interpret the fantastical atmosphere as merely a metaphor for the various conflicts involved in communication and relationships. This theme of an “amicable” coupling is even more prevalent in A Different Kind of Bliss (2008), Kristín’s third book. Yet again, she subverts the poetic form, although not as drastically as before. Here, the writing on the page takes a shape that is more aching to what is considered traditional for (modernist) poetry.

The collection contains four poems or sections. The first one, “The Path”, is not set in Iceland. The poem’s speaker travels by streetcars and wonders about existence, time, death, beauty and wax—to name a few examples. Most of the stanzas end with the phrase: “a different kind of bliss / how”; offering the reader a context or purpose, or perhaps just a sensation. The lines transition swiftly from one thing to another, sometimes forming a composite image, as in the passage on the light that:

breaks through the smallest cracks
the electricity
that’s lead through cords of iron and rubber
and nerves
I thought about nerves that dash together from habit
causing pleasure hunger
need for a specific form taste
I thought about cells that disintegrate
pain
anaesthesia pain killers muscle relaxants

However, this kind of gradually evolving imagery is rare. At times, the imagery is stretched or shattered; pulled together indiscriminately from a wide array of sources. In both cases, the effect is powerful, and as with the author’s previous books there is a constant sense of underlying turbulence.

This sort of turbulence is also present—if not nearly as loudly—in the other three poems. In the second poem, “Love and Eternity”, we are in Iceland, suffering the oppression of mundane reality—as can be seen in the line: “Grensás Road leads to hell”. The third poem is called “Sex and Death” and has a stronger, political feel which then takes centre stage in the final poem, which bears the self-explanatory title “Big White Man”.

As before, Kristín’s poems are fresh, powerful and almost overbearing at times. The imagery is drawn with loose, wandering lines that feel alive, creating a persistent sense of the poems slipping through the reader’s fingers—as with the couple in “Love and Eternity” who:

want murder
warm corpses and
something
that we don’t understand

The collection’s size, layout and illustrations are unusual; the cover is covered in writing: sentence fragments, words, rants and nonsense surrounding what might be bits of poetry. On top of this multi-layered background there is a picture of horses; perhaps the very horses described in one of the poems: “over the bed there’s a picture of horses / they run through water / somewhere in the picture there’s a tunnel / it leads elsewhere”. Later, the horses appear again when the poem’s narrator lies “down on the double bed / looking for an exit / a flicker in the horse’s eye”.

Here we can see how Kristín the visual artist weaves her imagery together using illustrations as well as text. She also has a hand in the look of the Nordic Literature book series as she helped design the covers along with Örvar Þóryjarson Smárason. Although Skin Coloured Wasteland has no illustrations beyond its cover, Meat Town includes illustrations by the author that reflect the prose and thus increase the atmosphere of isolation and horror that consumes the book.

KOK (gullet), Kristín’s fourth collection of poetry, has even more illustrations, but as Vera Knútsdóttir argues in her coverage of the book here on the website: “KOK [...] is almost a work of visual art as well as a poetry collection.” Vera points out that the book’s format is unusually large, which along with other aspects of its layout and marketing strategy indicates that KOK is not simply a book of poetry. It is easy to take Vera’s side and consider KOK a type of book-art. As such, it is a perfectly logical continuation of Kristín’s previous works of poetry—which, as has been said before, are marked by their improvisational imagery which interacts with their cover designs and illustrations. Here, the illustrations are in pencil and water colour, and some of them include poetry. Aside from the back cover, these illustrations are all in black and white.

The soft edges of the water colour drawings give the book more tranquillity than Kristín’s previous works of poetry, and the poems themselves are also quieter and more disciplined. As I said before, her earlier collections are filled with imagery that wields power all in itself, but in KOK such images have been made sharper, and Kristín’s use of repetition gives the reader a feeling of rhythm—especially when combined with the illustrations.

As in her previous two collection, there is an underlying narrative that is yet again examining a relationship. Around the middle of the book, the image of glass is used to symbolise the couple’s communication:

we collect miniatures made of glass
move around systematically
argue less than most
but when it happens
when it happens
happens
tiny animals of glass

hands of glass
genitals of glass
clothes of glass
our plans of glass
promises dreams
pets of glass
both our faces made of mirror glass
and we blow out little lies in glass
little pointless lies in glass

In this imagery, we can clearly see how Kristín has preserved some of the distinguishing characteristics of her previous poetry collections; how she drives the image onwards through the text. In a more traditional poetic structure, this effect takes on new shape but still wields the power and rawness of her earlier poems. Here, the symbols are clearer—fragility and mirroring—and the fantastical is not so extreme, but the feeling of fantasy remains.

At times, the poetry presents us with surreal images; e.g. at the start of the book when the speaker describes the early days of the relationship:

I gave you a fountain
and a ball
for a head
and a head
and I plucked grasses
and I ripped up trees
wove an ashtray from straws
wearing the mask you gave me
a mushroom cloud and severed
green-haired heads
and split fingernails
and stagnant smoke

One instance of repetition revolves around dressing and undressing. The first poem describes how “I” undress “you”, removing a black jacket. Except that beneath the jacket is another jacket and so on. Again, this can be read as symbolic for communication within a relationship; an effect which is unpacked further towards the end of the book in a whirlwind of rapid crossdressing:

and we dress ourselves in you
and you
undress us again
and we
dress you in us
and you
undress yourselves again
and you
dress us in you
and we
undress ourselves again

And so on. Here, the theme of communication within a relationship has been expanded to include communication in general, and the readers themselves have been drawn into the mix. Poetry is often considered the most personal literary form. In this passage, Kristín addresses her readers and encourages them to dress themselves in the feelings the book unveils. She also speculates on the link between author and reader and addresses the latter’s (interpretive) process of reading, which by its very nature involves flicking through images, dressing and undressing them in meaning and trying them on; i.e. trying on different characters. Finally, there is a reference to the interplay of illustration and text; how the imagery roams freely between the two and, at the same time, transforms.

Fiction

Communication is again at the forefront in Doris Dies, Kristín’s first collection of short stories, which was published in 2010. As opposed to the intimacy of her poetry, the stories in Doris Dies are more concerned with distance. The title story is a good example. In it, the narrator receives a phone call which informs him that Doris has died. He recalls their friendship and how they travelled through Europe together some years ago. They enjoyed each other’s company but there was never anything romantic between them, and they made sure to keep a deliberate distance from one another. The first time they touch, Doris says it is “like touching yourself” (82). Thus, it seems as if they have a profound connection, but at the same time barely know each other. After they separate, they immediately lose touch. The narrator can’t recall anything about her that might give him an insight into her life or her death. Thus, it might be said that the narrative portrays the interplay of distance and intimacy.

As a whole, Doris Dies is very different from Kristín’s collections of poetry. The narratives are far more traditional and not as wild and experimental as before. The collection thus marks a fresh start—or transition—in the author’s career, which is not uncommon for authors with Kristín’s background. To fall back on cliché, books that are published at this stage in an author’s career are often labelled as “searching”. They seem intermediary; a transition from one place to another in the author’s passage.

Most of the stories are rather withdrawn. As is commonly the case within the short story genre, they address events that at first glance seem inconsequential but then gradually grow in significance. In this way, they have an ominous effect upon the reader—such unease being one of Kristín’s signature themes. Overall, the setting is realist, but here and there the surreal raises its head—as can be seen in the story “Three Doors”. As said above, distance is a recurrent theme, one which takes many forms; from cruelty and coldness to its antithesis, where it may develop into a symbiotic relationship between two characters. The latter effect is most prevalent in the collections final story, “Holes in Men”, where a father and husband suddenly disappears without a trace. As time passes, his children discover various clues regarding his disappearance and his current whereabouts. However, towards the end of the story, his body is discovered, which results in an immediate and perfect understanding between his children—despite their different walks in life. The story’s title refers to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” and has a fitting sensation of pointlessness. “Hollow men” are in fact very common in Kristín’s writing.

For example, her story “Locate, Procure, File, Arrange and Preserve”, which is about a collector, is an amazing example of (pointless) details being compiled. In the story, the narrator describes where she was when earthquakes shook Iceland’s Southern Region in the year 2000. During the first quake, she is in a locker room at the Grund Home for the Elderly, but during the second quake she is visiting a strange man that she has got to know by chance, and who she is first and foremost hoping to use as fodder for funny stories to entertain her friends. He’s a collector who collects all kinds of strange objects, seemingly to insert an element of order into his life or into the world in general. “I always need something,” he says, “that’s my constant state of being from when I wake up and until I fall asleep” (31). It is obvious that he is a hollow man; his collecting fills in for something that he craves but can never grasp. Among other things, he collects animal skeletons, which he stores in meticulously labelled boxes and cases. However, everything gets jumbled together when the ground begins to shake.

This story might be considered an example of Kristín’s use of hyperrealism with grotesque undertones. This combination appears elsewhere as well and is usually accompanied by a feeling of cruelty and pointlessness. Even so, love is never far away; the collector story is also a beautiful love story. In such a way, the stories engulf a whole scale of emotions while also containing a general sense of tragic distance.

Distance is yet again a major theme in Kristín’s novel Hvítfeld, especially the constant distance that the novel’s protagonist keeps from herself. Hvítfeld bears the subtitle A Family History, referring to the very prevalent themes of family and familial relations found in Icelandic literature and biographical writing.

The story is narrated by Jenna, who lives in the United States and has done everything she can to sever all connections with her family in Iceland. When her younger sister dies, she is forced to return home but leaves after only a brief visit. Shortly afterwards, her mother has a breakdown, forcing Jenna to return again—this time for a longer stay.

During these two trips to Iceland, Jenna goes through a reckoning with her family as well as herself. It turns out that she is a compulsive liar, and almost nothing she tells the reader about her life in the US is true. Her lying started as early as teenage years, when she felt a constant need to make her life more exciting through exaggeration. Gradually, she creates ever more complicated webs of lies; lies regarding her supposed physic degree and her training to become an astronaut as well as all kinds of lies about her experiences as a prostitute and her interchangeable rich husbands.

Early in the book, Jenna talks about how she realised that Iceland is small, and the world is big, after which she decided to leave her homeland: “The plot of my life was meant to be grand and complex, and certainly overseas” (10). Shortly after, she talks about not telling her family about divorcing one of her several rich husbands, claiming that: “you can’t control much in life, but you can at least become the adventure that others observe from a distance” (15).

Interspersed with her various tall tales, we are presented with stories from the rest of her family; e.g. her mother, who is raised under difficult circumstances as both her parents are obsessive hoarders, and her father, who is a member of the extremely powerful Hvítfeld (white-fur) family—the name of which originated with an ancestor who killed a polar bear by himself. It turns out that in comparison to Jenna’s actual humdrum existence (unless that is merely yet another lie), the stories of her other family members are rather extraordinary and also filled with secrets. “Our family is a little bit like a hidden picture, like there’s something missing” (160), Jenna’s aunt says when the two of them sit down to discuss Jenna’s lying. Jenna is relieved when her lies are finally uncovered and claims that she herself doesn’t know “what’s true and what’s not” (161), but then she can’t resist twisting her own compulsive lying into a metaphor for society, where everybody constantly tells themselves lies.

Early in the book, there is a reference to the collapse of the Icelandic banks, which, as Vera Knútsdóttir points out in her review of the novel here on the web, can be read as yet another lie: “at one point, the compulsive lying is directly tied to the web of lies, denial and delusion that eventually led to the collapse of a society and an entire financial system. It can therefore be said that Hvítfeld is, at least to some extent, clearly written as a response to certain modern societal circumstances.”

You might say that the novel looks at the boundaries between lies and truths in people’s retelling of their own story and their family history. As pointed out by literary scholar Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir, all biographical writing contains a struggle against such boundaries. What do people remember and how do they remember it? What have they forgotten and why? How do they choose to shape their story? How does an incident become a story and what version of the story does the person involved choose to tell? You could say that Kristín addresses these quandaries in the novel, but she also constantly reminds us that all fiction is a lie—even if it might constitute truth within the lie that shapes it.

As with her short fiction, the book portrays a struggle between distance (or the act of distancing) and connectedness and intimacy. As pointed out by Vera, an element of this distance is based on violence against women and the objectification of the female body, which is a recurrent theme throughout the book. Distance and objectification, which at time turns into invisibility, is contrasted through desperate or hopeless loves, love affairs and romantic fantasies.

Kristín’s fiction is both similar and very different from her poetry. Her contributions in these two fields share a unifying characteristic in their themes of communication—which is a recurring element in all of Kristín’s work—but while her poetry is filled with surreal moments, fantasy and horror, her works of prose are more concerned with realism.

Plays

Kristín has also earned a name for herself as a playwright. Her plays include Karma for birds (with Kari Ósk Grétudóttir), which was staged by the National Theatre, and Crawl, which was staged by the Reykjavík City Theatre. Both plays debuted in 2013. Both plays are characterised by a surreal atmosphere akin to Kristín’s early books of poetry, and both fall within the realms of theatre of the absurd. Everyday circumstances gradually dissolve into ever more bizarre interaction that are both unsettling and full of power struggles. In Crawl, a couple is contemplating a separation. It is gradually revealed that the husband hasn’t left the house for a long time, and that their neighbour is seducing young girls who then disappear. The result is a sort of balance of terror, and it seems rather likely that there might be a connection between the neighbour and the husband. Slowly deteriorating communication is again at the forefront in Karma for Birds. Here, the characters are family, and the role that each of them plays is to some extent traditional or stereotypical. The daughter is getting married, but the parents are struggling to find the means to pay for the wedding. As the play progresses, the anticipated marriage takes on an ever more ominous tone, especially the interactions between the parents and their daughter. It becomes clear that these power struggles and abuses of power are to some extent symbolic for the Icelandic financial collapse.

In 2015, Kristín’s third play, Hystory, was staged by the Reykjavík City Theatre and also published in book form. In the play, three women, childhood friends, meet again after many years with no contact. One of them has lost control of her life, is unemployed and in bad shape due to excessive drinking. Another has a sociology degree and teaches at the University of Iceland, while the third member of the trio falls between the two; doesn’t have a university degree but works as a receptionist and has two children. The play roams back and forth in time; the women are shown as adults, children and teenagers. It soon becomes evident that all three are haunted by a traumatic event from the past that unites them—an incident in which they were the perpetrators. As with Hvítfeld, the play looks at the boundaries between lies and truth, but also considers issues such as guilt, culpability and consequences. Just like Jenna, the three of them have dealt with their separate feelings of guilt by lying about themselves—while also lying to themselves.

Kristín’s plays spend far more time contemplating the stature of women than her works of prose and poetry do. Conversely, it might be said that Kristín’s plays bring to the surface the underlying criticism of a woman’s stature in society that can be found in all her literary output. This provides an interesting example of layering within an author’s oeuvre. If all her literary contributions are taken together, it becomes clear that although each work is fully capable of standing on its own the interplay of her fiction, plays and poetry provides a new depth for the individual works as well as the writing as a whole.

Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, April 2017

Sources

Balakian, Anna, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press 1986 (1959)

2018 – Fjöruverðlaunin, The Women’s Literature Prize: Elín, ýmislegt (Elín, Miscellania)

2017 – The Icelandic Literature Prize: Elín, ýmislegt (Elín, Miscellania)

2014 - The Bookseller’s Award: KOK

Nominations

2015 - The DV Cultural Prize for Drama: Hystory

2014 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: KOK

2013 - Fjöruverðlaunin, The Women’s Literature Prize: Hvítfeld – fjölskyldusaga (Hvítfeld – Story of a Family)