Between 1989 and 1998, Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars penned five short novels that traveled fluently through genres — philosophy, literary theory, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, even nature writing — and anticipated autofiction before the genre was defined. Published originally and exclusively in Canada, Gunnars’ quintet has been published a single volume: The Scent of Light. The five-work cycle follows five protagonists — who may or may not be the same woman at distinct stages of life — as they navigate passion and loss, uncertainty and solitude, contentment and transcendence.

In her first book, The Prowler, Gunnars’ protagonist is simultaneously a young girl on the cusp of adolescence and a woman reflecting on her experiences. She comes from Iceland, a place of great beauty and greater poverty in the wake of World War II, where she is cold but cannot ask her father for more clothing: “It was not a country where children spoke to adults.” Her sister’s skin becomes covered in sores from malnutrition, and school-aged children are forced to cultivate sparse garden plots. The protagonist, a writer, has no obligations to climax, denouement, or introduction. She describes an author locked out of her own story, desiring magic words to coax a narrative into its pattern. She has always been an observer, and now she watches her own narrative from afar. Her watchfulness repeats how, as a young girl, she searched keenly for a face that had imprinted itself on her memory: the face of a sailor on a ship to Copenhagen when she was small and ill; a neighborhood prowler and murder suspect; the face of God.

Each short novel in the cycle unfurls elegantly, like a puzzle. Gunnars writes about writing: what it means and could mean. She writes in fragments, not often longer than a paragraph or two. In The Prowler and Night Train to Nykøbing, the fragments are numbered. In Zero Hour, The Substance of Forgetting, and The Rose Garden, each fragment is distinguished instead by a small glyph. Threads emerge, disappear, reemerge, or become knotted in dead ends by Gunnars’ deft hand.

In Zero Hour, the cycle’s second work, Gunnars’ protagonist must face her father’s death. The narrator pulls readers to her father’s bedside through a precise, emotional voice, so that a diagnosis becomes the detonation of a bomb. “It is probable that you do not know how you feel when you know the bomb is going to fall and explode where you are standing: when you prepare for it. You get the medicines. You put blankets on beds.” The protagonist considers the “ground zero writing” which she must now navigate: “There are no assumptions to draw on… Culture has vanished… Writing is enacted exactly where the bomb fell.”

Gunnars utilizes a lexicon of loss, uncertainty, and forgetting; any stability to which the protagonist has access arises from descriptions of place. Gunnars attends carefully to details of geography and setting, focusing on everyday images that recur. Before the protagonist of Zero Hour relocates to care for her father in the Pacific Northwest, she lives alone in an old mansion in Winnipeg. Her rooms are described with such vibrancy that I found myself looking out of its windows and at the paint peeling on its walls; I sat in the narrator’s garden with her wrought-iron furniture. As the protagonist watches her father weaken, and as colleagues, friends, and family visit his bedside for the last time, it occurs to her “how wonderful it is to be able to admire one’s own family,” but also to “be careful where you live for you may die there.”

Gunnars’ poetry of geography and environment reflects the interiority of each protagonist at specific periods of life: the barren poverty of Cold-War Iceland and relative riches of urban Denmark; the lonesome, isolated deep north of Canada; a claustrophobic summer home in southern Germany. The Substance of Forgetting, the third of the quintet, takes place in Canada’s lush Okanagan Valley — a respite after the previous novel’s hospital rooms and heavy tragedy. The protagonist is older, more certain of herself, verging on wise. Her fruit trees produce more than she can consume, so she shares her apricots with a company of close friends who play parts in alternating fragments along with a handful of past and present lovers. Here, Gunnars offers a protagonist who is learning to recognize herself in her actions and memories as well as happiness and peace.

Time and place are ever-shifting in The Scent of Light. To Gunnars’ protagonist in The Prowler, the past is akin to a deck of cards: “Certain scenes are given. They are not scenes the rememberer chooses, but simply a deck that is given. The cards are shuffled whenever a game is played.” In contrast, The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust transports readers back in time. The protagonist, a young woman spending a summer in the town of Trier, Germany, enjoys hours of solitude reading Proust. But in the background, there is a lover she works hard to repel, and their heated, messy arguments provide evidence that a “crazy drama was going on.” The novel is woven with passages from Proust’s oeuvre; Gunnars’ protagonist uses his fiction as a guide to organizing her own experiences. In Trier, “too many thoughts, memories, emotions were triggered simultaneously at every moment.” Gunnars writes her way toward big questions. Her protagonist muses, “If something was true at any time, can it cease to be true later? Or perhaps any truth is a form of art.” Later she determines that because “[t]here is never an actual answer to the question of text” and “no single purpose or meaning … the reader should act as terrorist. Should blow things apart.”

In addition to being richly descriptive and narratively encompassing, Gunnars’ books remain in constant and lively conversation with a wide range of texts, from the theoretical (Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud) to the literary (Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf) to the philosophical (Julia Kristeva, Søren Kierkegaard). The Rose Garden is in profound conversation with Proust, while Duras’ The Lover provides a point of departure for The Prowler; Zero Hour draws from Goethe’s Doctor Faustus while Yeats’ poetry shapes The Substance of Forgetting. Gunnars gently tugs readers into her narrators’ intellectual worlds, and the combination of elements and voices amounts to a unique style which, as the poet Kazim Ali says in his introduction, “seems to emerge not from a desire for cleverness or an intellectual or aesthetic commitment, but because the stories could not be told any way.”

In Night Train to Nykøbing, the last of Gunnars’ five works, the author maintains a dialogue most prominently with Clarice Lispector’s The Stream of Life (Água Viva). Her protagonist moves to Copenhagen to be with an elderly aunt. She resists a return to British Columbia: “Everything I desired to keep from my life was there.” She falls into a depression after the death of her mother. She repeatedly begins a letter to a lover but never finishes. She considers the words of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Martin Andersen Nexø, Annie Dillard, Toni Morrison, and many more. As the protagonist frees herself from a failing relationship, she finds guidance from Lispector, who was “using the language of ecstasy to talk about being free from love. No longer in love. To fill herself with her own life instead.” Night Train, like each of Gunnars’ short novels, it is a meditation and subsequent awakening. The five works within The Scent of Light offer readers entrance into a deeply magnificent coalescence of human experience, and with mystery and grace, Kristjana Gunnars and her protagonists lead the way through one immense, remarkable life.

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