This slim poetic prose novel by Kristín Ómarsdóttir and translated by Vala Torodds takes on larger-than-life themes in a world where the imagination bleeds into reality.
An unusual read awaits any reader when a book’s opening line is, “I come from a country that didn’t exist.” Setting the tone for the wild adventure that unfurls, Swanfolk’s protagonist Elísabet Eva throws us headlong into a world where we have to suspend our disbelief and be swept along for the ride.
Icelandic author Kristín Ómarsdóttir breadcrumbs the expansive themes she tackles in the novel’s prologue. In this brief snapshot of Elísabet Eva’s history, we see she is distrustful of language ‘as a machinery of power and corruption’, interested in her lost family and ancestry, and creates beings that may not exist in the material world, but are real to her.
The novel starts again, this time with a ‘Formal Beginning’, where we accompany Elísabet Eva to her job as a spy for the Special Unit at the Ministry of the Interior. Amidst this Kafka-esque bureaucracy, she is tasked with writing specific yet superfluous reports, her latest is on ‘stand-up comedy on the city’s stages during winter 20XX–20XX.
Despite the comradery she seems to have with her colleagues, Elísabet Eva is losing interest in her work. After days at the office, she takes increasingly longer walks beyond the city’s limits, seeking ‘experiences beyond words’. Articulating what these ventures beyond structure invoke proves challenging. The words ‘joy, calm, intimacy, peace’ do not match up with her feelings. While meditating on this, perhaps dozing off, she sees the titular characters for the first time. These hybrid swan humans have a lower swan half and an upper human half. She feeds them bread before they disappear. She loses their trail and dozes off in the park’s greenery.
After the encounter, she becomes unwell and reports to A&E. She is physically unwell, but, ever the dutiful citizen, resolves to ‘inform the authorities of my hallucinations’. They refer her to brain scans and she vows to trust the empirical evidence, ‘I would trust reality. But which one?’. As no results come, her fracturing of realities continues. Elísabet Eva spends more time with the swanfolk, joining them for feasts and nonsensical conversation evocative of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their company is a release for someone who is not at home in the surveilled, capitalist city: ‘Within me slept a desire to disconnect from this day and age even as I surrendered to its siren song and dutifully played my part as a disciple of its staggering mechanism’.
Yet the utopic visions the swanfolk initially offer come with an undercurrent of danger that charges through Elísabet Eva: ‘I felt both at peace and at risk there’. The swanfolk’s uncertain lineage and desire for survival appeal to her. They too occupy an in-between space, ‘We are both urbis amator and ruris amator’, they claim; lovers of the countryside and the city but somehow affixed to neither. Instead, storytelling and speculation of their origins are comfortable places for the swanfolk, much like Elísabet Eva. In the protagonist’s search for intimacy and affection amid her professionally distant and process-driven world, she falls into step with their customs and admires their unusual language. Nonetheless, the parallels between the swanfolk and her colleagues glimmer, from the similar clothes they wear to their lofty conversations whose points unravel into existential philosophies and nonsensical tangents. Suddenly, after an off-hand comment from Elísabet Eva, the swanfolk descend on her with swift violence.
Yet she continues to court their company and inadvertently takes on their mission to breed successfully, despite many failed eggs. When an egg is delivered to her workplace, a department-wide investigation ensues, along with the Ministry’s demand for more eggs. Soon, Elísabet Eva’s credibility is called into question and she finds herself at the mercy of the state she used to serve. The swanfolk, too, seem to reject her, once she has served as their messenger and assured their fate.
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Hints at the violent underpinnings of both the ‘countryside’ and the ‘city’ fuel the novel’s plot and its metaphors. When Elísabet Eva imagines the swanfolk, she sees them ‘sat at a half rainbow stretched upward like a machete’, their idyllic appearance undercut with a threat. Elsewhere, the booth at her favourite local pizza restaurant gives her a good view of the place, but would also serve as a good ‘bolt-hole if it came to a shoot-out.’
As Swanfolk continues, with visitations from a god and state-instructed torture, we are left to wonder what has happened to Elísabet Eva. Are the swanfolk real or a manifestation of a fractured world? What are the limits of our language to discuss trauma’s impact on our psychic and physiological states?
Ómarsdóttir originally intended for Swanfolk to be a children’s story, drawing cartoons alongside her writing. The resulting novel contains the darker elements that fairytales thrive on, though the moral here is as ambiguous as the ending. Ómarsdóttir’s work is dotted with outsiders, from Elísabet Eva and the swanfolk to a supporting cast of misfits, suggesting how common it is to feel isolated from one’s surroundings. But this fable is complicated by her creation of the swanfolk and their near-mythical status.
While it would be easy to doubt Elísabet Eva’s mind as much as the unnamed country does, perhaps Swanfolk is a reminder to cling to magical possibility amidst the state’s orchestration of violence and surveillance. Maybe the freedoms we seek in these in-between places are strengthened by our storytelling and memories, regardless of an official designation of truth or lie. Ómarsdóttir’s novel is kaleidoscopic; the more you look at it, the more you see. Whether you believe in the swanfolk or not, this novel invites the reader to test the limits of their magical thinking.
Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Swanfolk is published by Harvill Secker and is available to purchase online. To read more about Kristín Ómarsdóttir and her work, click here.