Quake

November 22, 2021
Jónsdóttir’s powerful story of memory, identity, and the legacy of violence, her English-language debut, chronicles a woman’s recovery from an epileptic seizure. Saga, mother to a three-year-old son named Ívar, wakes from a grand mal seizure with very little memory of her life. After she returns home, where her brother, sister, and parents watch over her, she tries to hide just how much of her memory she’s lost. As small details resurface, such as a vision of the bus shelter where she was waiting with Ívar and had the seizure, any negative memories that arise cause great pain (“Did Ívar chase after the bus?” she wonders, as her mouth fills with the taste of blood). All of this causes her picture of the past to darken with ominous blank spots. She does not know why she and her ex-husband, Bergur, are separated, nor what secrets from her family’s past caused her mother to go missing in the days following her seizure. By telling Saga’s jagged story in intimate narration, Jónsdóttir invites the reader to piece together the haunting memories and tragic realities alongside the main character. By the end, this becomes a gripping quest for the truth of what lies between the surface and what those around Saga have chosen to forget. The limited perspective and acute sense of the narrator’s pain, both ingeniously rendered, make this unforgettable.

December 1, 2021
The amnesia that descends on a young woman following two epileptic seizures forces her to reassess her role as daughter, sister, partner, and mother. Terror and desperation are the starting points for award-winning Icelandic author J�nsd�ttir's novel, which delivers Saga Bjarnad�ttir's first-person account of her struggle to resume control of a life she can't remember. An epileptic from childhood, she's been seizure-free for 10 years when she suddenly suffers two in quick succession, leaving her on the pavement of a busy street, in a fog but desperate to know the whereabouts of her 3-year-old son, Ivar. Hospitalized and suffering a third seizure, then restored to her apartment with Ivar found, Saga is nevertheless still in limbo, unable to recall what work she does or why she's divorced from her partner and questioning how she can ever cope alone again, given the risks of another seizure. Slowly, she--and the reader--pieces together some of her circumstances, including the flaws in her relationship with Bergur, Ivar's father, and the emotional tangle of her own family. Her mother has a tendency to disappear, her father has a history of violence, and there was a crisis about which Saga still experiences guilt. Part mystery, part family drama, part children-in-peril narrative, the novel offers a hectic, heart-thudding, sometimes claustrophobic portrait of panicked inner turmoil. Saga even refers to her epilepsy as a "him" who rules and invades her body. J�nsd�ttir has constructed a tight scenario and a small world populated by a narrow cast of characters with whom Saga hashes and rehashes past events and connections. A measure of peace comes not with a happy ending but some acceptance. An engrossing if stifling plunge into the consciousness of a woman on the edge.

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