The Scent of Light
Kristjana Gunnars
Coach House Books, 2022
Review by Kris Rothstein
This winter, the term “autofiction” followed me around until I felt the need to investigate further. At its most obvious it is autobiographical fiction—but just below the surface, there is much more going on in this genre. The work of Kristjana Gunnars falls within this category, not easily labeled as either fiction or memoir.
The Scent of Light collects five short autofiction novels published by Kristjana Gunnars between 1989 and 1998. Gunnars was born in Iceland and lived in Denmark and the US before making a home in Canada (though she travels widely) teaching and working as an artist. Although her first book won a prestigious award, and the ones that followed attained cult status, Gunnars did not have a high profile. Now, readers can enter her literary world through these collected novels, all related through a distinct style.
These novels contain extremely short chapters, often less than a page—this sketch technique allows for the comfortable digestion of dense thoughts and phrases. Gunnars mingles time periods: a difficult past which is abstract and needs to be decoded, and a present, which is grounded in something more concrete, even if it is confusing or hard to endure. All the novels in this collection are written in the first person, and while the “I” never has a name, the particulars of the stories correspond to Gunnars’ personal history.
For me, the most resonant of the five was Zero Hour, an elliptical account of the death of the narrator’s father and its painful aftermath. It deals with the immediate and the material: hospital diagnoses, home palliative care, a parade of friends and former students arriving for a last farewell. But it also swings into the dissolute emotional aftermath, when Gunnars/the narrator is living in Winnipeg, named only as the Gateway city. Everything here is disrupted, in flux—it is perhaps the best description of grief I have ever read. The narrative does not look away from beauty, horror, or death; intensity comes unexpectedly from quotidian details in sharp focus. Gunnars describes daily care routines, the subtle changes of her father’s moods and needs, and the physical nature of being with the dying, as well as the emotional toll. The person who remains after the death of her father is shattered; she does not recognize herself or know how to organize or live a life. “When a world disappears,” she states, “it takes away with it everything you are up to that moment. Your past is erased within a few minutes and you no longer recognize it as your own.” Grief is another country, viscerally laid bare. Hospice nurses counsel her family that they must talk and deal with their feelings: “When it comes to my father’s death,” the narrator explains, “I fear the violence of my emotions. If the mind were a nuclear reactor with a built-in safety shutdown mechanism, I could say my mind shuts down when thoughts of my father’s decline and fall occur.” She finds it hard to imagine ever putting herself together again—but the text celebrates this dissolution and dislocation. For Gunnars, grief must be lived and experienced, and rituals are necessary to make it to the other side.
The Prowler, Gunnars’ first book, is sly and playful, desiring to laugh at itself. It jumps and dances between times and locations in Gunnars’ childhood: Iceland, Denmark, America. The book does not try to make sense of or to classify the oddness and dreaminess of childhood—instead, it displays and embraces the disconnects, to be neither judged nor understood, but simply seen. The Prowler is also about the process of writing, and of learning that stories don’t have to echo the melodrama and scope of classic, canonical books. Gunnars, as the writer, asks many questions about the writing of her own book as it progresses. “Who should write the book, me or my readers?” she wonders. While sometimes clear and literal, the narrator more often finds that revelation comes from silence and obliqueness. “The novel I at one time intended to write rejected itself,” Gunnars explains. “It began to talk about its own genesis instead. The story disappeared. In its place there was another story, an unexpected story. A great surprise.” And a great scope—The Prowler touches on deprivation and toil in Iceland, kids with jobs, and strange, dreamlike illnesses. Class structures are revealed through friendships at Gunnars’/the narrator’s Danish school; forces and dangers which are mysterious to a child manifest through memories and stories, like a prowler. Later, this shadowy presence is revealed as the writer herself.
The Substance of Forgetting sinks into a sense of place, the Okanagan Valley, where Gunnars lives in a house with an orchard. The scents and tastes of fruit permeate this story—fragrant, sweet, and overabundant. The narrator loves the landscape and the quiet life: “The reason I like to live here is simple. Because this is where people come when they make holes in their lives.” At the same time, she is reflecting on a love affair with a man from Montréal called Jules. Rather than explained, the relationship is presented to us in detailed encounters and in broad thoughts and feelings. There is a ragged, nervous energy in Gunnars’ documentation of human relationships and their frailty, but a serene, stoic confidence when describing nature. This mix of calm and confusion is present in the narrator herself, a Pangaea of personhood, all traits and histories squashed together, waiting to be separated and organized once again. The seasons, whose cycles are so important throughout this text, seem to happen all at once. Disillusionment, disappointment, rebuilding—it is a cycle so richly human. The endless apricots of the narrator’s orchard, too many to consume or give away, are a metaphor for her whole life: too much experience, too much past, which she must find a way to manage or to jettison.
The Rose Garden is a novel akin to literary criticism, embedded within something like memoir. This piece chronicles a summer abroad in Germany, on an academic exchange, reading Proust. Full of quotations, references, and allusions from writers and critics, this is a story about thought, about unraveling ideas, and how our cultural baggage can enrich and inform us. Not much happens in the story itself, but so much happens in the mind of the narrator: “I could be telling a story, the story of my summer in Germany. It would have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A good story, perhaps. I would be the protagonist, but not the heroine.” The Rose Garden posits that fluent narrative is a lie; it is an elusive novel, literally about flux, the failure of narrative. At the same time, it explores the power of stories and reading, and how much the narrator gleans from Proust. In a fascinating passage, Gunnars condemns the consumerist model of reading, each book something to be finished or conquered, rather than a lifelong relationship. In reading Proust, she imagines how one book could inform your whole life in such a way that you might not need anything else; the book is a magnifying glass which can be used to bring things into focus.
Night Train to Nykobing, perhaps the most mysterious of the five novels, concerns the terrors and shackles of love. Gunnars/the narrator is embroiled in a passionate relationship—but the deeper we penetrate, the more ambivalent the love story becomes. It becomes clear that this love is an imposition, a prison, and, in fact, that the narrator wishes to be free. “The many ways a woman is taken from herself when she is in love,” the narrator considers. “She accedes. She gives herself over. Her own life has paled and the life of her lover has overtaken her.” The narrator and her lover have agreed to separate and not to communicate for a period of time, before a planned reunion. As this drama unfolds, the narrator visits Denmark, unraveling the nuances of family relationships, reconnecting with aunts and cousins, and reminiscing. It is unclear why the separation is happening—perhaps the lover is married and needs time to free himself from his wife—but it is stated that someone will be hurt. Most likely this will be the narrator, who is losing her selfhood. The eponymous train is not only a literal vehicle, but also a means through which the narrator will finally move into a future where she regains control.
These five books are not like anything I have read before. They are dense, intelligent and emotional, structured in a way that encourages breaks to reflect. Often mysterious, these stories use delicate and precise writing to provoke feelings that are deeply human. Gunnars uses form and theme to push past many of the boundaries of conventional fiction and nonfiction, and the stories she has produced are ripe and bursting with food for thought.
Kris Rothstein is a literary agent, editor and cultural critic in Vancouver, BC. She writes regularly for Geist Magazine and can be found blogging about film, comedy and books at geist.com/blogs/kris.