"One Hundred Fifty Square Meters" by Kristín Eiríksdóttir in One Sentence
How to bring a ghostly presence back to life
Lit in One Sentence will be on hiatus next weekend because I will be traveling in Iceland. 🇮🇸
Iceland is a famously literary island nation.
It’s home to the Jólabókaflóðið, or Christmas book flood, when ~500-1000 new titles are released in November and December of every year. Books are the most popular Christmas gift and many Icelanders create their wish list by marking all the ones they want in the annual catalogue. These are traditionally opened on Christmas Eve and read with a mug of hot chocolate or jólabland in hand.
One in 10 Icelanders will publish a book, and overall the country boasts the highest percentage of writers, books published, and books read per capita of anywhere in the world.
So of course, alongside researching all the waterfalls, hot springs, glaciers, volcanos, and other enchanting features of this island’s physical landscape, I was very curious to dip into the Icelandic literary landscape and choose an Icelandic story for this week’s craft breakdown.
I knew I wanted to focus on fiction writers who are publishing and popular today, rather than the beloved centuries-old sagas or canonical novels of the Nobel Prize-winning Halldór Laxness. I also knew that, rather than committing to any of the undoubtedly wonderful novels or collections on offer from a single writer, I wanted to sample a broad cross-section of different writers’ styles, so I could get a sense of who I vibed with most.
These criteria led me to Out of the Blue, a 2017 title from the University of Minnesota Press that is apparently the first anthology of Icelandic short fiction in English translation, and also the most recent one I could find. It features work by “twenty of Iceland’s most popular and celebrated living authors,” so — check. By this stage in my research, I even recognized quite a few contributing author names, such as Jón Kalman Stefánsson and Auður Ava Olafsdóttir, from novels that had looked intriguing to me. So, double check.
All that was left was to pick a favorite story for this craft breakdown. I was determined to review all twenty with an open mind, to let myself be surprised. I was also secretly hoping I would find a story that:
illuminated some realistic aspect of contemporary Icelandic life,
incorporated some magical element (the nation’s folklore is, after all, replete with elves and ghosts and trolls), and
was written by a -dóttir.
Reader, I found exactly that story: “One Hundred Fifty Square Meters” by Kristín Eiríksdóttir, translated by Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell.
What, in exactly one sentence, is it about?
“One Hundred Fifty Square Meters” in One Sentence
A woman and her aimless boyfriend must move into the only central Reykjavík apartment they can afford without removing anything belonging to the previous occupant, a missing Cold War enthusiast.
How to Bring a Ghostly Presence Back to Life
This may or may not be a ghost story. There are no explicitly supernatural elements in it, yet its primary setting — the apartment — is nothing if not haunted by the missing man whose possessions cannot be removed, supposedly for legal reasons.
The woman, Aesa, works in a clothing shop in downtown Reykjavík and, if she had her choice, would live on Bankastræti, a street so central she could pop in and out of her apartment during a night out partying. Or at least hear the sounds of others partying on the nights she stayed in, which would make her feel less fear of missing out.
Her boyfriend Dani is an unemployed artist. When the two lose the place they’re subletting — more expensive and just a little farther from downtown than the new place — he would be completely fine pitching a tent in the park, living on the streets indefinitely, or finding an abandoned ghost house in the countryside and slowly fixing it up. When Aesa offers zero enthusiasm for the idea of tending a rented garden in the farthest flung, least desirable neighborhoods of Reykjavík, he accuses her of being “acquisitive” and she has no idea what that means.
The rental market is terrible. A 150 sq meter apartment for 100,000 ISK (about 1600 sq feet for US $700/month) right near downtown is unheard of. Their friends pay the same for windowless basements. The 30 sq meter sublet they’re getting kicked out of in Norðurmýri cost 130,000 ISK a month (about 300 sq feet for about US $900/month). Yet the person who listed the new apartment on Craigslist is thrilled with their interest because, well, the place has been empty for a while….
Reason? It’s been a year since the previous occupant — a political scientist who’d lived there 30 years — vanished without a trace. And it will be six more years before anyone can legally remove so much as the crumb covered plate and empty coffee cup he left behind. Not to mention all of his ugly furniture and the Cold War tomes that fill his study.
Perhaps you noticed a key instability planted in this story’s superstructure: the aimless boyfriend. An empty vessel simply waiting to be possessed by the right spirit.
Dani is an artist who blames the financial crash for his inability to find work after graduating. He refuses to waste time worrying while he can count his unemployment checks as small artist grants, and plans to look for work on a fishing boat after that ends. He’s home all day while Aesa can’t stand to be in the new apartment, with the missing man’s possessions piled to the rafters of his old bedroom and her and Dani sharing the pullout bed in living room each night.
Is the missing man dead or alive? Will he return or won’t he? The answers are beside the point because (spoiler alert) Dani simply becomes the missing man. He starts reading all his books, smoking his abandoned pipe (to save money), and talking of nothing but the Cold War. He claims it’s research for an art installation he’s planning on the Cuban Revolution, and Aesa’s gentle suggestion that he could pick a more contemporary topic like the Arab Spring completely fails to land. He even picks up a mysterious “scent of old age,” starts to look a bit more stooped.
The closest the story ever comes to being a ghost story is when Aesa burns incense, rings bells, sprinkles water in the corners, trying to exorcise the place. “Come those who wish to come, and leave those who wish to leave, stay those who wish to stay, and not harm me and mine,” she mutters. Immediately after, Dani is eerily attracted to the study. In the months that follow, Aesa feels like all three of them are living there: herself, her boyfriend, and the vanished political scientist.
After six months, Dani realizes he’s been almost completely neglecting Aesa. He cooks her a romantic dinner but ruins it by wearing the missing man’s sweater, which Aesa demands he trash.
“The Cold War is over,” she tells him.
“When is a war over?” he retorts. “When the last scarred person dies? What about the invisible scars?”
She calls a friend to pick her up. She is finally leaving him for good. As he leans in the doorway watching her go, he whispers, “You can expect destruction from the sky, the likes of which have never been seen before on earth.”
It certainly makes him sound possessed. It also requires no supernatural explanations to imagine a recent Cold War obsessive blurting this out, since it’s a paraphrase of a line from President Harry S. Truman’s announcement that the United States used an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, thus launching the Cold War. (It might be the exact line, just a little shifted in the translations from English to Icelandic and back to English.)
Is this an allegory for the cyclical nature of war? A commentary on how our environment shapes who we become? Either way….
A key takeaway for story creators: To bring a ghostly presence back to life:
Create the perfect empty vessel of a character for them to possess,
Create a physical shrine to their spirit, and
Place the vessel in the shrine.
See you in two weeks!