The Scent of Light

Kristjana Gunnars

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781770567061
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Kazim Ali introduces five autofiction novellas by Kristjana Gunnars—available in the U.S. for the first time, in a single, handsome volume

"Between the late eighties and late nineties, Kristjana Gunnars published five transgeneric novels comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy. Elusive and poetic… rigorous yet passionate...these books were treasured by a devoted readership and have been lauded by critics throughout the years since." – Kazim Ali, from the introduction

From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator.

It is a life of thought, an ongoing engagement with writers from Proust to Kierkegaard to Kristeva, seeking and often finding a companionship in the writing of others. These five spellbinding narratives act as a bending bow, open to what life has to offer day by day and taking the gentler course, wherein nothing is forced and life's big questions remain beautifully unanswered.

The Prowler is a reminiscence of childhood spent in Iceland, seen from a distance with the Cold War as a backdrop, just before the hyper-modernization of the mid-sixties, when the air of the past was still discernible. When an orange was a delicacy against the darkness. This is Gunnars' most lauded novella.

Zero Hour is a contemplation and remembrance of the narrator's father and his death. The narrative traces the course of the father's illness and final moments, and confronts the reality and grief of absolute endings.

The Substance of Forgetting is ultimately about happiness. Set in a lush valley in central B.C., the narrator begins to awaken to possibilities of love and transcendence.

The Rose Garden is set in Germany and the narrator is on an academic exchange wherein all that happens are things that are not supposed to happen.

Night Train to Nykøbing is a darker exploration of life's (and love's) unknowns and the dangers inherent in choices we make. The narrator is travelling between Vancouver and Oslo in a continuous back and forth that gives rise to a sense of the liminality of life itself.

"The intimacy, grace, and intelligence of these narratives is remarkable. The mystery and quietude honours the beauty of the everyday as it passes, while simultaneously gesturing to vast other worlds. Often I was taken by its openings and distances, and a marvellous, almost translucent quality that permeates the texts. Oddly, at times it felt as if I were inside a whispering many-chambered shell – resonant, enclosed, pearlescent – the pleasure afforded, enormous." –Carole Maso, author of Ghost Dance

"From 1989 to 1998, the Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars published five novellas, each detailing specific moments in the writer's life. Gathered here for the first time, they offer a significant new strand of thinking about the rise of autofiction and the history of innovative women's writing in Canada. If you loved discovering Annie Ernaux, you'll love discovering Kristjana Gunnars." –Sina Queyras, author of Lemon Hound

NIGHT TRAIN TO NYKO/BING

Dear Dear Jan. But this is not the greeting that says what I want to say. Inside every greeting there is also a farewell. I try to wrest the goodbye out of the words that mean to greet him. Fully, without reservation. But the word will not go. The farewell inside is waiting to spring out.

Like a cougar. The cougars here have become many. They lurk in the trees. People who pass underneath are suddenly pounced on, taken by surprise. The Globe and Mail yesterday listed every cougar attack in British Columbia in the last ten years. They say attacks are becoming more common. The cougar is not friendly. They say you must look it in the eye. You must fight back because the cougar has only one goal. To kill.

Every single household cat in my neighbourhood has been killed by a cougar or a bobcat or a lynx. The wild cats prowl the bush behind us and crouch in empty lots still wooded. They prey on the small cats that wander out of doors. At least sixty cats are gone, a kind of ethnic cleansing performed by wild cats on domestic cats.

When I lived in the Okanagan Valley, I had two white cats named Winnie and Pooh. Pooh was eaten by a coyote, or so I thought. Now I think it may have been a cougar. Later I sold Winnie for a hundred and ten thousand dollars to some Kabalarians who had a belief in numbers.

I changed my seat in the first-class compartment so the station would not go out of view when we left. Riding backward, I could see the red brick platform elongate itself as we pulled away. He stood there still as a statue, the man I had just recently risen out of bed with. Hands in pockets, face of stone. The touch of his fingers was still on my breasts. The taste of his kiss. And yet the train was heading out of Skovshoved Station, severing us. Soon I would see nothing but wheat fields and straw-thatched farms.

My aunt Bodil stood in the hallway in her transparent nylon underpants and white brassiere. She was applying cream to her face in front of the mirror. Her bare feet on the cool parquet floor by the front door. I told her I was coming home again. I was moving back to Copenhagen from Vancouver.

The long sojourn was over now that Quebec was going. I said I had come to identify with the Québecois, and when they seceded, I would be without a country again. It was folly to go from one small country to just another small country. To exchange all of Europe, with the European Union, for a paltry bit of the Canada I used to know. I said it was madness to make such a bad exchange.

The heat rises from the ground like an old saying we no longer want to hear. Sunshine fills the air to bursting. I want to drown in that yellow heat. Lie on my deck naked, exposing myself to the harmful rays. I wonder how the day will pass. Why time has become so slow. Nothing stirs. The birds are strangely silent. This morning when I flung open the door to the garden, no birdsong greeted me. Only once did I hear an eagle call from a treetop in the nearby wood. An announcement of carrion, perhaps. A carrion call.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, in For a New Novel, says the world has only one certain quality: the simple fact that it is there. An explanation, whatever it may be, can only be in excess… That we imagine everything. That Drowned in the depth of things, man ultimately no longer even perceives them. How we colour the world with our own desires and aspirations. Everything is contaminated with our longings. Our fears. We invest ourselves in everything we see. It is, quite simply.

I think of how I have coloured the man at Skovshoved Station, who waited while my train pulled out, with everything I wanted to find in him. That it is impossible to know someone for who he really is. He is always an image of my desire.

Bodil had a small device for rolling her own Prince cigarettes. She pressed the tobacco into a tiny ditch in the mechanism and attached an empty roll of cigarette paper to the end of it. The lid would close and she pushed the tobacco into the empty cylinder of paper. She sat down in the morning with a small tray on her lap, containing tobacco, empty cigarette paper rolls, and the red plastic shuttle. There she sat filling cigarette after cigarette, the day’s supply, while the coffee went cold in her cup. I sat down opposite her and watched.

It was her meditative moment. With these scraps of tobacco, she contemplated her family and how she had lost them one by one. How few of us were left. I think she wanted to burn up her sad thoughts. To smoke them out.

From her small apartment in Vanløse, I could hear the noisemakers at eight. The trucks and cleaners and garbage collectors and sidewalk scrapers. A man in a blue cotton uniform that resembled a Maoist pyjama set, with a cap on his head, stood across the street with an assortment of brooms and pans. He was cleaning the sidewalk. Down the street the bicycles had begun.

Martin Andersen Nexø was a Danish writer who died in the 1950s. He wrote the novel Pelle Erobreren, which was made into the movie Pelle the Conqueror. Nexø was a communist. He moved from Denmark to East Germany and lived out his days there. When I came back, he was posthumously made honorary citizen of his birth town, which celebrated its six hundred and fiftieth birthday. It took the Danish authorities over thirty years to get over their author’s politics. Or was it just the very idea of preferring East Germany to little Denmark?

In time, I thought, the oddest absurdities may be forgiven. Time always seems to be the conqueror.

Above the brown leather sofa in Bodil’s flat was an oil painting. The picture showed an old Danish farmstead on the island of Fyn. There was a courtyard of cobblestone. The stuccoed walls were braced by wooden beams. The straw on the roof was held down by crossbeams at the top. The houses were small and low. This was my great-great-grandfather’s farm, when he was a landowner, she said. The old man had a penchant for gambling, but he was not good at it. Because of his gambling, our family lost the farm and went from landowning class to labour class in one generation.

I said we would buy it back. Now that I had returned from Canada, we would go and buy the old farm back and return it to the family. Then we could also say time had conquered that adversity. She looked skeptical. I think she did not believe me. She took some deep, slow drags from her cigarette, and her eyes were fast on me, languorous, almost dreaming.

Yet I had not actually returned, for that was still only a plan. Something in the cards. Written in the tea leaves. Something I saw in the face of the man at Skovshoved Station. His was a beautiful face and in it I could read a volume. Several volumes. Something that said I was about to return. They were penetrating eyes. It was the man who waited with me for the train. The one who held me and I him. The one I would not let go of.

I still had to go back to British Columbia. The house I had constructed was still there. Everything I desired to keep from my life was there, where I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction by Kazim Ali
• The Prowler
• Zero Hour
• The Substance of Forgetting
• The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust
• Night Train to Nykøbing
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Author