“Place of the Heart,” by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir, won the Icelandic Literary Award in 1995 when this book was first published. Since then it has been translated into Danish, Finish, Norwegian, Swedish, French, and German; in the process, it was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Prize and for the French Prix Aristeion. This is the book’s first English translation. The translator appears to have done an outstanding job because Sigurðardóttir’s stunning, emotionally searing, and confident literary prose is easily discernible.

The book tells the story of two dysfunctional relationships between mothers and daughters.

Thirty-one-year-old Harpa, and her delinquent 15-year-old daughter, Edda, embark on a road trip from their home in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, eastward toward Harpa’s beloved idyllic hometown of Fáskrúðsfjörður located on a picturesque fjord of the same name almost as far east as one can drive on Iceland’s famous rim road. It’s a rescue mission. Harpa needs to save her daughter from falling victim to a dangerous, criminal, Reykjavik teen drug culture with which the girl has become infatuated. Their relationship has sunk so low that the daughter is physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive toward her mother, and the mother is at the point were suicide seems an alluring alternative.

The two make the trip with Harpa’s childhood girlfriend, Heiður. They escape in Heiður’s pickup with the rebellious girl ignoring them both by disappearing into dark defiant music on her headset and sinking deep into the back seat oblivious to the breathtaking scenery. They only have a week to make this trip. Will it work? Will the spectacular natural beauty of Iceland save this teenager from falling in with the dark side of life? Can Harpa regain her joy in living? Can getting to Fáskrúðsfjörður, the place of Harpa’s heart, transform this mother-daughter relationship and reset it on a healthy track?

On an almost equal footing, the book deals with a second dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, the one Harpa had with her own mother at the same age. As Harpa looks back on her life, she realizes that she was a rebellious youth, too. After all, she conceived Edda when she was a child of fifteen. The road trip offers many opportunities to reminisce and rethink her past. Even though Harpa’s mother is no longer alive, she is every bit a fourth woman present on this journey. Can Harpa come to terms with her mother’s role in her life? Can getting to the place of Harpa’s heart help heal the wounds of the past and open Harpa’s heart to the present?

I can easily see why this book won Iceland’s highest literary prize. Sigurðardóttir is a brilliant and masterful literary artist and a keen observer of human psychology. The characters in this book are as authentic and real as life itself.

However, this novel is not easy to read. Much of it involves people who manage to inflict great verbal and emotional damage on each other despite their love for one another. Reading about this can be tough, even grim at times. Thankfully, this is offset by the splendor, fascination, and yes, humor, of the road trip.

Last year, I spent two weeks traveling Iceland’s rim road in peak summer. For me, Iceland has some of the most awe-inspiring natural beauty on earth. This book provided me with an opportunity to relive that experience, in part. If you haven’t been to Iceland, you may want to look for photos on the Internet about many of the places on this road trip. It will help you appreciate and understand this book; also, I can guarantee you’ll want to plan a trip there soon.

Unique Icelandic and Nordic cultural references are packed into this book. Each reference exerts a strong positive emotional pull on the person who understands and has lived his or her life fully aware of that reference. I’m sure that was one of the reasons why this book continues to be extremely popular in these cultures. But most of these references are virtually unknown in our English-speaking world. To help the English-speaking culture better to appreciate and understand these parts of the book, there is a glossary at the back with detailed notes explaining the special meaning and significance behind unique words, phrases, and place names. Unfortunately, these references are not tied by number or symbol to the text, so one has to constantly leaf back and forth between the glossary and the text whenever an odd word, phrase, or situation with a cultural context arises. Even then, I missed a lot and only noticed that there was a glossary explanation after the fact. Perhaps the Kindle version does a better job at connecting these. The book is still enjoyable without any knowledge of these references. The glossary helps us understand, but it does little to add to our emotional reaction to the text.

I took the time to listen to the small free sample of the audio version of this book. Personally, I think this is one clear case where I might have preferred to listen to this book rather than to have read it. I say this because the professional reader was able to change her voice nicely so that different characters were identifiable by tone and pitch. With this book this would definitely help; with only the print version, I often got confused. In this book, the dialogue is not punctuated in the normal fashion (with quotes), so it is easy to fail to know if something is truly dialogue, and if so, who is talking and who is listening.

Iceland is a uniquely functional culture. The people of Iceland often head the list of the world’s “happiest people.” There are only 325 thousand people in the whole of Iceland. Everybody knows everybody and nobody is more than two degrees of separation from everybody else. This means the entire island is like one huge family. Perhaps that is why this dark, light, and humorous tale of family dysfunction is so attractive. It is something very different and unique. There may be a dark drug teen culture in Reykjavik, but it certainly pales in comparison to others in major capitals around the world and Iceland is still one of the safest places on earth with an extremely low major crime rate.

This book is an important work of world literature. I recommend it to all who are interested in fine world literature. Also, it offers a unique view on Icelandic and Nordic cultures. ( )