While technically a mystery novel at its heart, Christina Sunley’s The Tricking of Freya reads like a transnational Icelandic-Canadian memoir, a uniquely crafted and deeply exploratory tale involving the themes of immigration and cultural dislocation in the context of today’s American modernity.
What starts out as a letter to a long-lost sibling replete with flashbacks from Freya’s past, gradually shifts gears to form a thoroughly engrossing account of a search for identity set against the magnificient backdrop of contemporary Iceland. Impressively, Sunley’s work brims with asides on mythology, history, culture and language of this remote island nation, which help to acquaint the unfamiliar reader with fundamentals of Icelandic tradition in a remarkably natural way. It is thus that we learn about the great migration of Icelanders to Canada that followed a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the late nineteenth century; the words for heaven, gimli, and love, elskan; the primordial myth of the Ginnungagap, the “yawning abyss” from which the universe was born; and the apocalyptic legend of Ragnarok, the end of the world predicted by ancient pagan seers.
The Tricking of FreyaPublished in 2009, Christina Sunley’s beautifully written debut novel The Tricking of Freya is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in Iceland and the greater Scandinavia region in general. At once a heartfelt tale of familial intrigue, a thoroughly researched introduction to the culture and history of Iceland, and a testimonial to the importance of exploring one’s roots, the work is roughly organized around the search of 30-year-old Freya Morris for a long-lost relative. The daughter of an Icelandic-Canadian mother and an American father, Freya lives a mundane life in a Connecticut suburb commuting daily to work in a darkroom in New York City. Haunted by the memories of her traumatic past and disinterested in the uneventful present, she struggles to come to terms with her childhood experiences, Icelandic heritage and identity as a person. Building on this premise, Sunley delivers a powerful, culturally potent narrative every bit as memorable as the much-referenced Icelandic sagas and eddas themselves.
Freya, her name a variation derived from that of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and beauty, is torn between fully embracing her Icelandic heritage most vividly represented by eccentric aunt Ingibjorg (Birdie for short) and confirming to the more familiar North American culture she is growing up in. On summer trips to Gimli, an Icelandic-Canadian settlement on Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Freya’s mother Anna and Birdie can never agree about whether or not Freya should be taught Icelandic. Anna’s good friend Vera meanwhile finds Birdie’s extravagance, flamboyance in fashion, mood swings and suspiciously playful demeanor around men to be signs of bad taste rather than cultural difference.
Yet, her aunt’s liveliness, exuberance, and generally mercurial nature prove magnetic, pulling young Freya into a distinctly Scandinavian reality of myth and folklore where ancient superstitions live on amid a uniquely sophisticated and open-ended modernity which, remarkably, seems to value style over substance while at the same time placing freedom of artistic expression above all else. Birdie’s is a volatile, strangely inspired world of secret alliances, philosophical obstinance to monoculturalism, and ulterior motives where feelings change “like lake weather” and the lack of predictability is perhaps the only certainty. Following in the footsteps of Freya’s grandfather, the great poet Olafur, Birdie experiences occasional bursts of creativity during which she works on her own epic masterpiece written in the Icelandic language, The Word Meadow.
Deeply affected by her aunt’s love for the family heritage, almost cosmopolitan enthusiasm for everything cultured and refined, and insistence on the preservation of tradition, Freya begins to sympathize with Birdie as she represents an escape from the routines of her otherwise mundane and conservative life. It is this self-exploration and reacculturation of Freya to the Icelandic that form the backbone of Christina Sunley’s highly recommended work.
