‘Girl Interrupting’: History and Art as Clairvoyance in the Fiction of Vigdís Grímsdóttir

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The year 1980 marks a distinctive change and exciting renewal in the general development of post-war Icelandic fiction. An obsessive preoccupation with rural nostalgia and urban malaise gradually gives way to a decidedly anti-realist fiction which celebrates the wonders of everyday day life in the city. The term magical realism is often used in this context, and indeed, there can be little doubt that the Icelandic translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1978 constituted an important influence on writers during this period. One contemporary Icelandic author who has made striking use of magical realist strategies to dislodge the current impulses of modernity in Icelandic culture and disrupt imposed ways of perceiving reality is Vigdís Grímsdóttir. The aim of this article is to discuss the innovative ways in which Vigdís has used Icelandic story-telling and folklore traditions, preserved and passed down mostly by women, to reaffirm, from a female perspective, a localised cultural imagination within a contemporary globalised Icelandic urban context.