Authenticity in fiction: My problem(s) with Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s ‘Hotel Silence.’

‘Hotel Silence’ is the latest novel by the Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize. It is published by Pushkin Press, a fine outfit that specialises in work in translation. ‘Hotel Silence’ is “Humane, eccentric and bleakly funny” according to the Sunday Times, and “A dark comedy that deals with our darkest thoughts with deft humour, and boasts some surprisingly insightful truths about human nature,” according to Esquire. It is well-rated on Amazon.

But I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like it for three reasons, but all three have to do with authenticity. Let me show you what I mean.

First, though, I should furnish a precis of the plot, such as it is.

Jónas is in his fifties, has a daughter who turns out not to be his own, and is recently divorced from a wife who stopped loving him roughly a decade ago — if, indeed, she had ever loved him to begin with. This has all added up to make him feel it is pointless to go on living, and so he decides to off himself.

However, he fears what the discovery of his corpse would do to his daughter, and so he journeys to an unnamed country that has recently emerged from a terrible conflict.

While you might expect that Jónas would now be plotting to commit suicide-by-war, you would be quite wrong: he travels with a drill and his toolbox so that he can arrange to hang himself in his hotel room.

However, on arrival at the Hotel Silence, he begins to get to know the hoteliers and the other guests, and deems that it would be just as bad to commit suicide there as at home: the collateral damage would be as great. In the final pages we learn that his friend back home in Iceland has committed suicide by walking out into the sea, and so the novel ends with Jónas getting back into a taxi to make the return journey.

Essentially, Jónas learns little to nothing along the way. His character arc is notably flat, and by the conclusion of the novel I felt I knew him as poorly as I did back on page thirty.

The flatness of his character arc, and the thin-to-the-point-of-translucent nature of the plot are not why I disliked ‘Hotel Silence,’ though they did not help. Instead I disliked the book because I felt it horribly inauthentic.

1. Early Warning Signs

At the start of the novel, Jónas is at a tattoo studio. He wishes to get a white tattoo of a lily over a scar on his heart (whether the scar is literal or figurative is left to the reader to decide, I think — or maybe I missed something).

Much of this scene rang false.

First, if Jónas is intent on covering up a scar, getting a white tattoo is probably not the best way to go about it since these tend to appear almost invisible to the naked eye, and when his chest hair had eventually regrown would likely never be seen again.

Secondly, when Jónas approaches the tattooist (who is described in the most cliche-ridden way), the artist is seen holding the tattoo gun in readiness to get down to work. Strange — they have yet to even discuss terms.

“He himself [the tattooist] is covered in tattoos all over his body. I observe a snake winding up his neck and wrapping itself around a black skull. Ink flows through his limbs and the triceps of the arm that holds the needle sports a coil of triple barbed wire.” (Loc 61)

I am not suggesting that Ólafsdóttir, a sixty-two year-old professor of art history, failed to do her research on tattooing before writing this scene; I am simply suggesting that what research she did engage in might not have taken her any further than a TV documentary about celebrity tattoo artists.

In short: the scene felt horribly inauthentic, and somewhat patronising.

2. Where in the World?

I have never liked it when countries are invented to support a plot point. The Bond franchise is guilty in a curious way here. In ‘A Quantum of Solace’ Bond races to South America to foil a coup plot in Bolivia (or does he arrive too late? Or does he not care? I can’t recall, having only been able to watch the film once). However, in the previous film, ‘Casino Royale’, Bond is first witnessed tracking down a suspect in the African country of Nambutu; only, there is no such country. Clearly the producers of the Bond films are occasionally worried of causing offence by naming names. They are not alone.

So when Jónas decides to take a vacation — his last, he believes— in a country recently caught in the grip of a major war, will this country be named? Or will it be given a Bond-like pseudonym?

Neither, it turns out.

Ólafsdóttir decides to make of the country a cipher. It exists only for Jónas to travel to, and just as Achebe complained of Conrad making use of Africa as the inessential backdrop to ‘Heart of Darkness’, so too can it be argued that Ólafsdóttir is writing in bad faith here. Jónas finds his redemption here (or not — it doesn’t much seem to matter); he certainly finds a place for himself, if only for a while, since he is a handyman and seems the only person left in town who can actually repair anything.

The problem with not naming the destination is that, since half of the novel is set in this country, it would really help for our world knowledge to fill in some of the blanks left behind by the author. And there really are some serious blanks here. The country resides in the author’s imagination, but that is where it stays, never escaping the bonds of generalisation. I came away from the book knowing — and caring — nothing for the country nor the plight of its citizens. It didn’t feel real.

It felt inauthentic.

3. Nobody Speaks Like That

Tom Clancy—not the first person I would turn to for philosophising — once remarked that “the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.” Not only fiction: dialogue too needs to be grounded in reality for it to work.

And in ‘Hotel Silence’ it really does not work. Instead, every character speaks like a poet, and since every character thus appears touched with poetry, all of the characters end up blending into one.

Let me illustrate with some quotes. I have not gone through the book looking for exemplifications of this problem; here I am simply going to choose a random page in the book, and pull out what I think are problematic sentences.

“Since you came out of your mother’s womb there have been 568 wars,” says the voice in the armchair. — Loc 173 (spoken, I believe, by the protagonist’s elderly mother, apropos of nothing).

“Did you know,” he says, “that in some places in the world scars are symbols that command respect and a person who bears a big and impressive scar is a person who has looked a wild beast in the eye, and tackled his fears, and survived?” — Loc 335 (spoken by Jónas’s friend Svanur, after Svanur has shown Jónas his scars from the surgery to fix a slipped disc; whether the disc slipped during a battle with a wild beast is not known).

“The best moments in my life,” I hear Svanur say, “are when I’m lying alone inside a sleeping bag up on a heath, holding my rifle at the crack of dawn, waiting for the birds to wake up. Remaining silent and staring at the crust of snow. It’s like being inside a womb. One feels secure. One doesn’t need to be born. One doesn’t need to come out.” — Loc 537 (the first half of this quote would have sufficed for me; at forty I have yet to hear a single male friend speak the word ‘womb’, but maybe I’ve lived a sheltered existence).

“Cats have always outlived man,” he says. “If not your cat, then someone else’s.” — Loc 995 (spoken by the owner of Restaurant Limbo — I’m not even making it up — for no reason, and with even less sense).

And on it goes.

Saving Grace

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. There are aspects of the novel that I liked. Just as I found the part of ‘A Town Like Alice’ that dealt with the evolution of the shoe factory in Alice Springs to be fascinating, I really enjoyed Jónas’s adventures in the world of the handyman. They were relaxing, almost zen-like, not to mention well-delivered. It felt like Ólafsdóttir knew what she was writing about.

Unfortunately, the book was just too bogged down in things that didn’t work — you could say there was an under-abundance of detail, and even when the details were supplied, they came across as deeply inauthentic. When Fifi, the young man running the hotel, finds a box of books in the basement, each one is like a key to some aspect of Jónas’s soul; not a single one of them is by Danielle Steel. If one had been, I think I might have liked ‘Hotel Silence’ a lot more.