People in the basement Reviews

"A marvellous book, we’ve gained a brilliant new author... Excellently thought-out and beautifully styled."

“Audur’s best book.”

“Audur Jónsdóttir belongs to that generation of young women that are becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary Icelandic literature. She hit the scene with a bit of a bang when her first novel was nominated for the Icelandic Literary prize in 2000. This was followed by another novel, two children’s books and finally this new novel which forms the subject of this review. “The People in the Basement” undoubtedly confirms her as highly skilled and unusually mature author.

Audur’s new novel kicks off in a supermarket where the main character, Klara, is shopping for a dinner party with her concubine Svenni. The story unravels as we follow the preparations for the dinner and eventually the evening itself. This narrow time-frame is undoubtedly reminiscent of one of Virginia Woolf’s most interesting works, Mrs. Dalloway, which starts off with Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers for the party she is throwing that evening, and then goes on to describe the preparations for the evening, the evening itself, and finally its conclusion.

Klara’s background – like Clarissa’s – is almost totally revealed to us during the course of the party, culminating in the moment when all her thoughts and emotions crystallise at the end of the story. Despite the fact that she is obviously distinctly more modern in her thinking than the eighty year old Clarissa, Klara nevertheless shares a number of common traits with her, such as her high dependence on the man she lives with, despite the distance that has grown between them and her withdrawal into her own world. Both desert the stage of the party to vanish into private worlds their partners do not belong to, but turn back once they have found the correlation between the external world and inner realities. Klara and Clarissa both live under certain “shadows”, which serve the purpose of showing us the directions their lives might have taken. These "shadows" reveal the perils that lurk within the dark sides of their private lives – in the “basements” of their consciousness – and in so doing paint convincing psychological portraits of characters such as Fjóla, Klara’s childhood friend, and Septimus, Clarissa’s spiritual twin, and imbues the protagonists of both of these works with a necessary depth, which might have been difficult to achieve by any other means. Fjóla also plays an unexpectedly key-role in the closing chapters of “The People in the Basement”, as Septimus does in the final chapters of Mrs. Dalloway.

Whether Audur Jónsdóttir’s reference to Virginia Woolf is a conscious one or not, it plays an important part in the novel and in our interpretation of it; not least because there is nothing black and white or predictable about the way the story unravels for the reader, which is first and foremost the perfect framework within which the authors’ can explore the social and psychological roles of their female characters, who form part of a broader research and debate that stretch beyond the parameters of a single novel. Because Klara and Clarissa both face an existential crisis, which, to some extent, can be attributed to their sexuality and the different roles of the sexes in society, which of course has always been an element in cultural history over the ages. On another level, their circumstances couldn’t be more different, since both novels faithfully reflect the places and periods in which they are set.

Klara is the firstborn of permissive sixties parents, who believed that, by rising against the prevailing values of their times, they had found all the answers and an opportunity to build a new and better future. Her parents lived through that period in Icelandic history when the country was swiftly mutating from a stagnant agrarian society into a westernised consumer society, which made it easy to transpose the ideological models of the external world to an Icelandic context. But despite their sincere open-mindedness and longing to live in harmony with their high ideals and make the world a better place, her parents fail to rise above the mundane problems of their own microscopic worlds. They are ruled by constant tugs of war, abuse, drunkenness and financial woes – blended with hot passions, pangs of conscience and some kind of struggle for psychological dominance. Klara has problems trying to fit the fragments into a coherent history of her family and upbringing; the memories are too contradictory; bittersweet recollections that trigger off paradoxical responses. Through her vivid narration, Audur manages to draw these paradoxical peculiarities up from below the surface of this text, which is all at once tragic and funny, tolerant and judgemental, warm and sardonic. At the same time it is a faithful description of the extreme values of this period which paved the way towards our times.

Klara’s problem when it comes to evaluating her past and upbringing is how to distinguish between the high ideals and human values that one is supposed to aspire to and instil in others, on one hand, and those abstract human weaknesses that undermine the lives of individuals who are incapable of fully facing themselves. She concludes that it must be possible to know the world and the answers to its problems, without knowing oneself, as is the case with her parents. The solution she reaches at the end is therefore rational and premeditated: she does what her parents never did; takes full personal responsibility. This is symbolically played out in the next generation through the character of her niece, Nonni, who faces the same existential crisis she faced as a child.

The title of the novel, “The People in the Basement”, clearly reflects the symbolism of the subject matter. The building is both a metaphor for society at large with all its stratifications, and the individual’s inner world where we all conceal our hung-over ideals under different guises, while some uncomfortable elements lurk in the darkness of the basement. In her moment of greatest weakness, Klara descends into the basement – both literally and metaphorically speaking – to look reality in the eye. When she comes back up she knows what she has to do.
The brilliance of Audur Jónsdóttir’s new novel is the context she manages to create around the perceptions of her main character, not just in a literary sense, as has been illustrated above, but also in her contemporary historical interpretation of the times – so that within the inner framework of the story there is a very clear and understandable connection between, for example, the “situation in the Middle-East” (as one chapter is called) and the depths of Klara’s inner world. She feels responsible for the outside world, and is considerably more realistic than her parents when it comes to recognising her limitations. “She just can’t believe in her own guts,” Svenni says of Klara (page 263), not realising that this trait may be her greatest strength. Because in the next chapter “everything is”, in spite of what has been said, she musters up the courage to go down into the basement in search of answers, in search of something that might give her life a noble purpose and stop her from fleeing. Her discovery that everything simply “is” brings out the best she inherited from her parents’ upbringing, a recognition of the important things they have instilled in her. She discovers, moreover, the need to follow another route to be able to live with this "everything is". She therefore makes an unbiased choice and – unlike her parents – draws a line between her own personal existence and the existence of the people who in a metaphorical sense lurk in the “basement” of her life. The line that she draws has a parallel in her own private life, because it is not until she has learnt to face the deepest recesses of her own soul that she will "hopefully" (page 290) be able to turn her back on them.

“The People in the Basement” is a novel in which the author manages to link the small inner framework of the story to the larger context that lies outside the work itself: the here and now through the paradoxes that we all experience in the face of the suffering of our fellow-men, whether it be in the Middle East or the people we might bump into in IKEA or Habitat. A context where people think they can save the whole world but unwittingly wreck their own children’s lives. This is the story of our times in the broadest context. The author strikes a tone that has such a familiar ring to it that it almost becomes uncomfortable – but is truly powerful.”

“The narrative of People in the Basement flows very nicely and Audur Jónsdóttir manages to very naturally convey Klara’s mental world and circumstances. … the character of Klara is made of flesh and blood. …the author certainly knows how to tell a story. A very accessible contemporary story. The narrative is very everyday and human. This is simply the story of Klara and her family. We discover the profound influence of her family, whether they be close at hand or faraway, whole or fragmented – we are all the product of some family pattern or the absence of one. Trying to define our lives and raison d'être. Trying to find a way to rationalise our circumstances and all the paradoxes of the mind. The contradictions of a world that doesn’t always deal love in equal shares.”