Gnarr Read Free Page A

duvet. Now is the time to stay at home. There’s not much energy left for winter romances in this country. Not only do we not have any real summer, but no real winter either. If it snows one day, there’s a frost the next day and on the third day it rains. The lakes are frozen in the morning and thawed again in the evening. You never know what to expect. That’s why, unlike the other Scandinavians, we Icelanders have never made much headway in the winter sports. The only sportwe’re really good at is chess. After all, indoors you can hunker down at the chessboard all year round.
    We are shaped through and through by nature and the elements. We have a tremendous ability to adapt—and you need plenty of that if you want to survive in this country. You can never rely on everything staying the way it was here. The earth might quake or a volcano could erupt. Your garden might get buried under a lava flow, and there are snow storms in June. But we’ve learned to live with it—perhaps because we’ve maintained a certain degree of humility towards nature and her moods.
    Nature we cannot change, but we
can
change ourselves and our way of thinking. To nature we can only adapt. We go fishing when the sun shines and we make hay when the sun shines. This adaptability has always been our strength, as it’s the only way to survive here. If you don’t make an effort, don’t store provisions, and don’t use the opportunities that present themselves to you, then when winter comes you’ll simply starve.

SEND IN THE CLOWN
    I was born into a working-class family in Iceland. We lived in a Reykjavík suburb on a street called Kurland, named after a Norwegian village. My parents were ordinary folk. My mother worked in a hospital canteen and my father was a policeman, but he never got very far in his career because of his Communist views.
    By the time I happened along, my parents were no longer spring chickens. According to a frequently cited family anecdote, I was supposedly the result of a drunken, day-bright May night in the West Fjords, maybe even the night of the First of May—for my father, one of the holiest days of the year. The late pregnancy was a huge shock for my parents, not least for Mom, who was terribly ashamed to be producing me at the age of forty-five. Dad was fifty.
    When I finally arrived in the world, I turned out to be a redhead, which raised all sorts of questions. Dad’s hair was raven black. My grandmother, who lived with us, was convinced that the father of the baby just
had
to be our next-door neighbor …
    My brothers and sisters were all much older thanme, and in my childhood I had little or nothing to do with them. It was my parents, my two grandmothers, and my aunts and uncles who brought me up. My parents’ siblings were older than them, and every year an uncle or aunt died. Someone was always dying. Most of them got cancer and slowly wasted away, and at some point in the midst of all this death, both grandmothers died too.
    I was considered to be difficult. Wild and impetuous, with a short attention span, I put up resistance to everything and everyone. I did, however, learn to talk extremely early and by the time I was just two I was chattering freely. I tended to hide myself away instead of playing with other children, but then again I was untamable, climbed trees and house roofs, ran out into the street, and put my safety at risk in all sorts of independent ways. I also liked throwing bad language around, the more indecent the better. I was a permanent provocation, and never predictable.
    So right from the start I was seen as the black sheep of the family. I was a precocious child in a deadlocked world. My allegedly abnormal behavior was the normal reaction to abnormal circumstances. As is so often the case. The neighbors pretty much all thought there was something seriously wrong with me and doubted that I would ever cope in a normal school. After my umpteenth trip to the emergency room, they sent