In the early 20th century in Iceland, an impoverished island with hardly any roads, a midwife might have to walk in the dark through a stormy night to reach a birth. Some of these stories are one of the materials for the latest novel by the Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Reykjavík, 1958), La veritat sobre la llum (Editor Club), the first to be translated into Catalan, in this case by Macià Riutort . The author had to come to Barcelona to present the book, but two days before, during a trip to the mountains, she fell and broke two ribs, so the appointment had to be virtual.
Dýja, a young woman almost addicted to work, lives in the apartment she inherited from her great-aunt, Fífa, also a midwife – in her mother's family there are several midwives, her father runs a funeral home. For years the aunt had written a lot of articles to the newspapers that pointed to climate change, without being listened to, and left three typescripts between the history of the old midwives – from real memoirs of midwives from the beginning of the 20th century – and reflections on animal life and on how human beings have treated nature, some texts that Dýja reads while considering what to do with them.
In the original language the title is Vida animal, because as the author says “it is a book about light, but also, and above all, about the human as an animal, the behavior and the nature of humans, and the title worked very well in Icelandic, but in other languages I preferred La veritat over la llum, which was already my working title”.
And it is that in Icelandic, the office of midwife is ljósmóðir, mother of light, the word that in 2013 the Icelanders voted as the most beautiful word in their language. “It was the starting point: I told myself that I would write a novel about light in which the protagonist would be a midwife. I build the novels by oppositions, if I write about life I have to write about death, light and darkness, and that is why I dated the plot in the darkest time, Christmas, when there is less light but the birth of light is celebrated , the day begins to lengthen, two more minutes of light each day”, he explains.
“Man –says Auður– is the most fragile and at the same time cruelest animal. The human being has known for more than fifty years what he has done to the Earth, the scientists already told us and we knew where we were going, but nobody listened. So I decided that Fífa would write articles in the newspapers, but no one would listen to her. I created her to say the things that I can't say, because she would be preaching. But it is an optimistic book, there is hope because our fragility and weakness can also be our strength: we have a brain to adapt to challenges, if we want, we can find solutions”.
Catalan version, here
