A review by gemmadee
Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir

4.0

I don’t understand it at all. Like everything else I’ve read by an Icelandic author, Children in Reindeer Woods has a flat, matter of fact tone to it. Reindeer Woods feels like an extended riff on James Clavell’s The Children’s Story, except I think it might actually be making the opposite point. Sagas and Laxness excepted, all of the Icelandic books I’ve read have been short enough to read in a sitting, or two days at most. All of them have a spare elegance I associate with 20th century Japanese novelists like Kawabata or Niwa, whose minimalist stories told only prosaic events and details and hid the meaning in the spaces between the notes. The difference is that translations of modern Japanese authors are always accompanied by lengthy introductions that help explain the cultural signposts of the events in the story and give some of the context needed to make sense of the book. All the help I got for Kristín’s book is a back cover blurb that says, “A lyrical and continually surprising take on the absurdity of war and the mysteries of childhood.” Because those two themes are obviously related.

I have to assume the blurb is right because the two main characters are a soldier who pretends to be a farmer and a precocious child who fears she may be retarded living together on a farm called Children in Reindeer Woods after he kills everyone else who lives there. What the fuck?

In any case, about 150 pages into the book, I realized that there was more than simple tension driving me forward through the book. I was, strangely, genuinely concerned for these two characters who might not really be humans or who maybe represent all humans. Rafael and Billie are both just children after all, and it is hard not to care if they figure out how to survive the coming winter on the farm and maybe even not kill any more people.