Audur's Depositum - interview

It´s only been two years since Audur finished her last novel and harvested several good reviews, prizes and nominations. Now It seems like history is repeating itself, her first book review in Denmark, published in Jyllandsposten on Friday, is very favourable.

A new Novel is out soon with the name Tryggðarpantur (Depositum). It is about a rich lady who, after having spent all her inheritance, is forced to take in tenants to make ends meet. The book is described as a modern novel, focused on current much debated issues in society.

"Yes, you can read the novel with a lot of current issues in mind, " say Audur. " Or just as a story about four women who rent a flat together". The idea was born in Denmark where the debate about the multicultural society has reached boiling point and a lot has been going on.

"I wanted to write about this mixture, or integration, that has been been going on in Europe. At the same time, I wanted to tell that kind of story from a human point of view and not only from the general point of view of religion or the meeting of great cultures. A lot of things can go wrong when individuals interact without these elements having much to do with it, you can easily have cultural differences with your closest friends.

The story takes place in a fictional city which Audur claims can´t possibly be located in Iceland. "I imagine a European metropolis like Berlin or Barcelona, multicultural but at the same time with a class of locals with deep roots in the society and this carries a lot of rope towing and conflicts with it. People in Iceland have not been forced to address these issues in the same degree as other nations in Europe because foreigners in Iceland come mostly from Europe and not from completely different cultures. The debate has therefore been different from many of our neighbouring countries.

Icelanders are pretty "one or the other" in their attitude. I remember a few years back when I was studying Danish in a school for immigrants. We were two Icelandic women in the class, full of self righteous indignation and always criticising the way the Danish were treating the immigrant population. Later, when we were asked how the Icelanders treat this matter we were forced to look at our own society and then we realised we had no idea. Audur is nevertheless confident that the book will be understood by Icelanders because it is mainly addresses the human aspect of these questions.

Audur has lived in Copenhagen the last few years but is soon relocating to Barcelona where she plans to study Spanish and Catalan. She says that although she now often writes in a European context she cannot imagine herself writing in other languages than Icelandic. "I would not dare to write in Danish for example, it is far to easy to make mistakes. Danish is much more complicated than you would assume from a brief encounter.

(Loosely translated from article in Fréttablaðið, 01. Október 2006)