Land of Love and Ruins

Icelandic author Oddný Eir’s Land of Love and Ruins (2016) was translated into English by Philip Roughton. Defying the boundaries of genre, the novel weaves diary entries and philosophical musings with the travelogue of a journey undertaken by the unnamed narrator around Iceland and Europe in search of a sense of “home.” Land of Love and Ruins won the 2012 Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize and the 2014 EU Prize for Literature.

The novel begins as the narrator, a woman writer in her 30s, returns to her family home in Reykjavík after the break-up of a long-term relationship. “It’s strange being home. I’m relieved, though I still feel a bit homesick. I’ve got to try to create a home of my own. Probably alone.”

The story proceeds as a series of journal entries, each labeled with a location and something that marks it in time, whether a festival from a religious calendar, the phase of the moon, or some personal special occasion. As she explores the question of “home” and of her relationship to it, she examines love and family, politics and economics, and deeper questions of ancestry, social cohesion, national history, and global travel.



She explores the real world as well as the world of ideas, visiting rural Iceland, Paris, Strasbourg, Basel, London, and Cumbria in the north of England, to trace her family’s history. In her grandmother’s home, she writes: “It’s strange to have come to a place I’d heard so much about. I even feel farther from the place now, when I’m here inside it, than when Grandma described every little nook and cranny, all its patterns and colors, as if she were describing the emotional life within the house at the same time.”

The narrator also goes birdwatching and visits archaeological remains, graves, and museums. Slowly she develops a tentative theory of home: “A place of experimentation and discovery…where the most natural in each individual can be developed.”

Alongside—and ultimately as part of—this quest, the narrator interrogates her relationships, primarily those with her ornithologist boyfriend, “Birdy,” and her archaeologist brother, “Owlie.” She seeks balance, striving to remain an individual in each relationship, but she is also frank about the shifting boundaries within and between each relationship. It is no coincidence that brother and boyfriend are nicknamed in the same affectionate way. The history of the incest taboo is a recurring theme, for instance prompting a visit to the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, siblings who lived like a married couple: “I had to come here and see the siblings’ house, find out about their life together, discover whether the dwelling they shared might reveal something of the closeness of their relationship. If I could learn from it.”



Chasing down the idea of “home,” the narrator reads Heidegger, encountering the philosopher’s idea that a home can be made in language: “I’d underlined the following sentence, in pencil: Language is the house of Being.” She begins to formulate ways in which language—and especially the concrete act of her writing—can offer a solution to the problems of home she has encountered on her quest.

Throughout the novel, the narrator portrays contemporary Iceland—in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis—and interrogates its political conversation. In particular, she is determined to find a feminist way forward for the country, or at least to lend her words to the feminist side in the struggle over Iceland’s future: “I really want to find a kind of feminine solution within the whirlpool of our male-centered culture.”

She zeroes in on a nexus of land, nationalism, and patriarchy, a knot she seeks to unpick. Her observations on this theme range from the radically deadpan—“Private ownership of vast tracts of land appears to be an anachronism,”— to the romantic—“Finally, water is being legally classified as a resource. But what about the desolation, the beauty and the spiritual space, the atmosphere?”—to the tongue-in-cheek—“I think that farmers should be psychoanalyzed and rethink their connections with the earth and masculinity.”



To these problems, too, she muses on linguistic solutions: “I tried to save the life of nature from the claws of nationalism…So I came up with new alternatives, taking only ten years to find the right terms: móðurjarðarást or móðurjarðarumhyggja, that is, love or care for mother earth. I find them a bit beautiful—though maybe not very manageable. Maybe it’ll take another ten years to find better terms?”

However, the narrator’s intellectual quest is ultimately an unending one. Even her inquisition into the nature of “home” is open-ended, coming to momentary rest on the idea that home is something you leave behind: “All homes are, in some sense, museums. People surround themselves with things that remind them of the lives they once longed to live.”