The Shape of Silence

Description

A work of literary nonfiction that traces the hidden emotional history of Iceland through three generations of one maternal line.

Iceland is known for its sagas and for its remarkable reinvention after the 2008 financial collapse. Less often told is the story of the country’s inner life—the emotional austerity that took root over centuries of extreme poverty and systemic control, and the silence that settled over generations of Icelandic families as a result.

In The Shape of Silence, Alda Sigmundsdóttir braids memoir with social history to tell that other story. She traces her maternal line through three women: her great-grandmother Þórdís, whose household was broken up after her husband was lost at sea in 1906; her grandmother Elínborg, who was four years old when she was sent to be raised by strangers as a tökubarn, a fostered child; and her mother, who grew up in the long shadow of that separation. Around them she reconstructs the world that shaped them. Under the vistarband, landless people were required by law to live and work on a farm as laborers, and paupers, children among them, could be auctioned off to whoever would keep them most cheaply. Around 1700, 96 percent of Icelandic farmers did not own the land they worked, and most people lived in dependence on others, with almost no legal recourse and no language for their inner lives.

Icelanders found ways to survive. They told stories of hidden people and read aloud to one another through the long winter evenings. They also learned to endure without complaint and not to see what was being done to them, a response psychologists call betrayal blindness. Those habits kept a nation alive, but their effects did not vanish when prosperity finally arrived. They were passed down through behavior and through silence, and Sigmundsdóttir follows them through her own family and into modern Iceland, from the banking collapse of 2008 to the question of who owns the fish in its seas. The particulars are Icelandic, but the pattern is familiar wherever ordinary people have lived for generations under hardship and under systems that demanded silence.

Throughout the book, Sigmundsdóttir returns to the image of a glass wall that forms between people who have been through too much and learned to show too little. You can see the person on the other side, but you cannot reach them, and they cannot reach you. The Shape of Silence is an attempt to see clearly what has been passed down through one Icelandic family, and through countless others.

Readers of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am, and anyone with Icelandic roots, will find an exacting voice and a story of Iceland not yet fully told.