The Scent of Light

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"Between 1989 and 1996, Kristjana Gunnars published five linked novellas, all in the same fragmentary style, all helmed by the same narrator. They were autofictional before such a term existed; they presaged the work of writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti. 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 and Kristeva, finding a companionship in the written texts of others that allows the narrator to leave questions unanswered, to follow the course of love. The Scent of Light brings these five novellas together for the first time, contextualized by an insightful and informative introduction by acclaimed poet Kazim Ali. These prose works each have their own theme although together they follow a thread that unifies them. They are in dialogue with thoughts and poems and works of Italo Calvino; Hélène Cixous; Annie Dillard; Hermann Hesse; Clarise Lispector; Toni Morrison; Alain Robbe-Grillet; Christa Wolf; W.B Yeats; Antonin Artaud; Jean Cocteau; Northrop Frye; Martin Heidegger; Susan Howe; Fredric Jameson; Søren Kierkegaard; Julia Kristeva; Anaïs Nin; Marcel Proust; Virginia Woolf and others. This intertextuality stems from the idea that written texts are inevitably in communication with each other as soon as they take their place in the world library. "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 that occurred in Iceland after the mid-1960's, when the air of the past was still discernible. "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. The backdrop for the narrative is The Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, which is being read all along but also mirrored as text. "Night Train to Nykøbing" is a darker exploration of life'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."-- Provided by publisher