In Quake, the English-language debut novel by award-winning Icelandic author Auður Jónsdóttir, a woman falls to the sidewalk in Reykjavik and wakes up in the hospital, having suffered a seizure that has all but erased her memory. It does return, but only slowly, in terrifying fragments. She has a young son. He was holding her hand when the seizure struck. What happened next? She has no clear idea.

The woman’s name is Saga, a name that means story. Stories are, in fact, her problem. What story will make sense of her many losses? She fears her son is gone for good, and that his disappearance is her fault. This isn’t true, but she can’t allow herself to be reassured by what others tell her. Alternative stories simply don’t register. Her memory loss opens the door to fears so all-encompassing they border on hallucinations.

Stylishly translated by Meg Matich, Quake twists an archetypal parental nightmare — what if there’s something about me that I don’t control which makes me a danger to my child? — into a dark and sly meditation on dishonesty, selfishness, and dishonesty about selfishness, which sometimes takes the form of a story. The novel raises questions about the cost of that bad faith to ourselves and our warming planet.

A caring family surrounds Saga. At least they seem caring. But their interactions are laced with ambivalence. Saga’s husband Bergur is a case in point. Precariously employed and too clever by half, he coyly styles himself a “scholar of Facebook,” and he writes books with titles like Cryptograms. While he certainly does his share of household work, he also constantly signals his willingness to weaponize his essential separateness from the household, forever raising the possibility that he might have secrets — or he might not, you never know!

Saga’s incapacity presents Bergur with an opportunity that he ought to forego but does not. He uses her seizure to suggest that she’s an unfit mother. Already acutely aware of this possibility, Saga is overwhelmed by guilt — on which Bergur fully capitalizes. “Don’t you trust me?” Saga asks, dismayed. “I trust you,” Bergur responds, adding disingenuously: “I just don’t trust your body.” Naturally this impossible statement touches off an explosive exchange. But Saga’s anger only confirms her inadequacy in the eyes of her husband, who executes the coup de graçe: “But you think it’s acceptable to leave your son’s life hanging in the balance between your ego and your next seizure?”

If Saga’s seizures distance her from Bergur, they also bring her family members into closer contact. Coming home after her hospitalization, she finds them having breakfast. “I feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine. When was the last time we were all together at table?” Despite the pretty tableau, this family isn’t happy. Saga’s older sister is fretful and controlling; her younger brother is barely there. They all deny a great deal, staying strategically blind to themselves and each other. Still the past seeps back. The revived memories prove too much for Saga’s mother, a charmingly frenetic knitter of bright woolens. Despite her air of chipper competence, which suggests stability, she soon disappears. Her disappearance adds to the atmosphere of menace, but before we can really sink into it, someone new is ringing the doorbell, red-cheeked and wrapped in a bright hat and scarf, bearing a container of fresh kjotsupa.

Jónsdóttir balances the novel’s atmosphere of threatened loss with mordant wit. Here’s an example: Because Saga is the family’s breadwinner, Bergur does a lot of the domestic heavy lifting, including childcare. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bergur’s writing focuses on the plight of masculinity in what he calls “modernity,” that is, in a social democracy where successful professional women like Saga freely insist upon and effect conditions of gender equality that are as good as any in the world. An apparent milquetoast, Bergur is, in fact, aggrieved and spoiling for a fight. Jónsdóttir deftly skewers this attitude in a scene involving a paperback that Bergur has left, like one of his precious cryptograms, in the glove compartment of the family car. The book is How to Be Alone, “a collection of essays about man and modernity” by none other than Jonathan Franzen, the patron saint of Bergur-style grievance in its most presentably middle-class form. Despite the fogginess of Saga’s memories, a clear remembrance attends her discovery of this particular book: “The sight of it reminds me that I must get around to cleaning the car.”

Quake is funny, but it’s not light. Saga’s trauma is so severe that she must reach for large and impersonal sources — the geophysics of Iceland’s volcanic landscape — to make sense of it. “For thousands of years,” she says, “magma built up pressure below the earth’s surface until unseen chambers could no longer contain the tension. In that instant, lava ascended through conduits torn like wounds in stone,” causing the earthquake of the book’s title, a “stóri skjálfti [that] rives the ground apart, forces fossils and fragments of silvery crystal to the surface, antediluvian histories petrified in basaltic memory under stratum, stratum, stratum…”

As Saga recovers, her memories bubble up like lava, too powerful to remain repressed forever under the “stratum, stratum, stratum” of cheery morning coffees and afternoon kjotsupa. One particular memory, once unearthed, provides insight into the source of Saga’s intense maternal guilt. Experts advise her to exercise, to get more sleep, to reduce her “stress.” Saga replies, “It’s not so simple.” She knows that her problems don’t stem from any choice she might make or from a single traumatic event. Rather they are the natural consequences of a life lived under the pressure of terrible experiences inexorably piling up. Her seizures erupt like mental volcanoes, and “uncharted reservoirs” of memory “rush to the surface.”

Saga connects her personal problems to larger changes, observing that “Iceland has changed in recent decades, softened and brightened, shooting out tendrils of connection to the world.” Where the kitchen’s spice rack once contained just salt, pepper, and a thyme-like herb called blóðberg, there is now abundant garlic and perpetual fresh herbs. The earth is warming, to be sure, but I don’t think climate change is the whole story. Like the Irish author Tana French, whose intelligent thrillers are read partly as comments on Ireland’s rising status as a center of global finance, Jónsdóttir seems interested in the world beyond her characters’ local entanglements. In the years immediately preceding the novel’s publication, Iceland suffered a series of political and economic shocks related to the broader debt crisis; these shocks were part of the book’s original context. “Perhaps,” Saga muses, “Iceland itself is epileptic.” But unlike French, Jónsdóttir is saying something less reassuring — and, for my money, more interesting — about storytelling. Saving ourselves and our planet may rely on seeing more clearly and feeling more honestly, and for that we may have to do better with our storytelling, lest we be forced, as Saga ultimately is, to renounce it altogether.

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