{"id":288326,"date":"2011-12-05T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/12\/05\/the-greenhouse\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:11:49","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:11:49","slug":"the-greenhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/12\/05\/the-greenhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greenhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

2011 has been a banner year for Icelandic literature on the international stage. \u201cFabulous Iceland\u201d was this year\u2019s guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and in August, UNESCO<\/span> named the Reykjav\u00edk as one of its five Cities of Literature—the only such city where English is not the native language. Perhaps even more notable for American readers, however, was the recent announcement that Amazon\u2019s new publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, will release an astounding ten Icelandic titles in new English translations over the next year. Judging by the press\u2019 first Icelandic selection, The Greenhouse<\/em> by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, English-readers can look forward to a catalog of remarkable Icelandic titles in the coming months.<\/p>\n

At once wryly observant and sweetly comic, The Greenhouse<\/em> is a meditation on such sweeping themes as sex, death, becoming a parent, manhood, and finding a place for oneself in the world which doesn\u2019t once fall prey to cloying generalizations or cliche. Rather, through the eyes of twenty-two year old Arnlj\u00f3tur Th\u00f3rir—or Lobbi, as his elderly father affectionately calls him—author Audur Ava Olafsdottir breathes a freshness and sincerity into her subject matter which is as charming as it is insightful. <\/p>\n

The novel opens with a birth and a death. Having lost his mother in a car accident just a year earlier, Lobbi is also adjusting to his unexpected new role as father. His first child, Fl\u00f3ra S\u00f3l, is the product of the unlikely indiscretion of \u201cone quarter of a night, not even, a fifth, more like it.\u201d His mother\u2019s death and the birth of his daughter both take place on the same day, which also happens to be his mother\u2019s birthday. Lobbi\u2019s father ascribes this confluence to \u201csome intricate system,\u201d while his son dismisses the coincidences as meaningless chance. \u201cIn my experience,\u201d he sagely remarks, \u201cas soon as you think you\u2019ve got one thing figured out, something completely different happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

This statement ends up being wiser than Lobbi could imagine, as all of his best laid plans and worldviews are systematically upended throughout the novel. Feeling himself to be somewhat superfluous in the life of his daughter, and at loose ends with his father and autistic twin brother at home, Lobbi decides that rather than go to college, he will travel to a remote (unnamed) village monastery abroad to work as an gardener. Although he is generally indecisive and frequently unsure of himself, the decision is not a difficult one. Lobbi was \u201cmore or less brought up in a greenhouse\u201d by his mother, who shared with her son a knack for cultivating tomatoes, flowers, and roses where once had only been \u201ca flat stretch of barren land with rocks surrounded by wind-scattered pebbles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lobbi is not even out of Reykjav\u00edk when his plans begin to go awry. He falls ill on the plane and must be hospitalized upon landing. Once recovered, he rents a car and begins his long journey, only to find himself lost in a deep forest and unexpectedly transporting an inn-keeper\u2019s daughter to her drama class, 350 kilometers out of his way. Finally arriving at his destination, he finds solace in the monastery garden and a mentor in a monk with a love of dessert liqueurs and art house cinema. But he has not been working at the garden long when he is contacted by the mother of his child, an aspiring geneticist who would like Lobbi to \u201cbear [his] part of the responsibility\u201d and help her look after Fl\u00f3ra S\u00f3l while she completes her thesis. Thus, in very short order, Lobbi finds himself living with a woman, raising a daughter, learning to cook, and hopefully, figuring out what he wants to do with his life.<\/p>\n

The Greenhouse<\/em> is a meandering novel and although there are quite a few happenings throughout the narrative, not much actually \u201chappens\u201d per se, and nor does it need to. Lobbi\u2019s daily negotiations of quotidian responsibilities are so sweetly related that something as simple as making dinner can become a rich, humorous, and illustrative moment. From Brian FitzGibbon\u2019s seamless translation, it is clear that Audur Ava is a beautiful prose stylist who uses simple and straightforward language and imagery to convey complex emotions and observations. Interspersing scenes from Lobbi\u2019s daily life with reflective moments from his past—the last conversation he had with his mother, sitting up and watching his daughter sleep the night that she was born—Audur Ava creates a fully realized portrait of a young man coming into himself without even really being aware of his own transformation. <\/p>\n

The Greenhouse<\/em> is a novel about finding beauty in the everyday, in simple moments and acts—in making dinner, and planting roses, and helping a child learn to walk. It is a story of creating meaning in one\u2019s own life, especially in the face of chance and coincidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2011 has been a banner year for Icelandic literature on the international stage. \u201cFabulous Iceland\u201d was this year\u2019s guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and in August, UNESCO named the Reykjav\u00edk as one of its five Cities of Literature—the only such city where English is not the native language. Perhaps even more notable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[32746,43366,43386,6046,14766],"class_list":["post-288326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-amazoncrossing","tag-audur-ava-olafsdottir","tag-brian-fitzgibbon","tag-icelandic-literature","tag-larissa-kyzer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342176,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288326\/revisions\/342176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}