Journey Home [Paperback]

Olaf Olafsson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2002

For years, Disa has lived a quiet life, managing an English country-house hotel with her companion Anthony. However, upon learning that she is terminally ill, Disa decides it is time to travel back to the village in Iceland where she was born. Olafsson takes the reader with Disa on her quietly heroic journey as she heads north, seeking a resolution to painful matters she has spent most of her life trying to forget.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Holed away in lush British farm country, Disa runs a small inn with her friend Anthony. They're both past middle age, eccentrics who understand each other too well. Their life consists of early mornings, chores, twilight walks down to the reflecting pool. Guests descend on the place in spring, full of noise and expectation. Disa runs the kitchen, serving up gourmet dinners that have become famous among savvy food critics and tourists.

Olaf Olafsson's The Journey Home is constructed in tight succinct fragments, like journal entries. Shuttling between past and present, it's about reckoning with grief and bad memories in the face of death. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Disa knows she needs to make a journey back to Iceland, a place that reflects the past back to her: a mother who abandoned her, a fiancé eventually killed by the Nazis.

Although not much directly happens in this novel, great tension develops between the pull of memory and the push of the moment. In Disa, Olafsson (Absolution) has created a vibrant character who wants to overcome sadness by plunging into the sensual. She's always cooking up fantastic meals, and the descriptions of food are truly mouthwatering: trout "fried with a sprinkling of ground almonds," apples "which I love to bake after they have soaked in port for a long, quiet afternoon." The powerful smells and sights of life rescue Disa from fear--if she doesn't quite believe in God, she believes in the immediacy of the world. This is the novel's subtly redemptive tendency, laid out piece by piece in Disa's soothing melancholy voice: "Sometimes you have to get a grip on yourself to keep your thoughts under control, but it's worth it. The reward is just around the next corner, whether it is a clutch of perfect eggs in a basket or the sound of birdsong on a still day. The soul can take delight in small things if one's dreams only leave it in peace long enough." --Emily White --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The cool undercurrents of history shiver the surface of this serene fiction set in England and Iceland after WWII. Twenty years after the war, Icelandic migr Adisa ("Disa") Jonsdottir is a successful, Elizabeth Davidesque restaurateur, manager of Ditton Hall, an English stately home transformed into a hotel. She lives with Anthony, the local squire, in a common-law arrangement and has assembled a staff suited to her perfectionist, willful character. Into her impeccably choreographed life comes the sudden news that she is terminally ill; knowing she may have less than a year left to live, she sets out to visit Iceland one last time. On her travels, a series of flashbacks bring memories of her childhood in Iceland and her early culinary training in prewar London. Buried deepest in her heart is the fate of her Jewish lover, Jakob, who returns to Germany from London in 1938 to try to rescue his parents. Alone, Disa goes home to Iceland and its quasi-racist politics, where she signs on as a cook for the well-to-do Haraldssons, whose troubled adult son has recently returned from Germany under a cloud. Olafsson (Absolution) writes in a spare but moving English, though sometimes Disa describes her recipes with more richness than the characters in her lives. Perhaps too reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler in Remains of the Day, Disa weaves her own spell in Olafsson's accomplished novel, saving the tale from melodrama with her calm self-possession. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (April 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571204996
• ISBN-13: 978-0571204991
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,314,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A LUMINOUS TALE THAT HAUNTS, December 12, 2000

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey Home (Hardcover)

Olaf Olafsson inhabits two seemingly disparate worlds - he is vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media in New York, and Iceland's bestselling novelist. While I cannot confirm his business acumen, I can enthusiastically attest to his mastery of the literary arts.

The Journey Home, Mr. Olafsson's second novel is a languid yet riveting distillation of a woman's life, an uncommonly beautiful diary of her physical and emotional quest. It is a very human story of one who possesses strengths and frailties, intuition and self-delusion. The author limns these traits sympathetically yet with unflinching candor.

Disa Jonsdottir and her younger sister, Joka, enjoy a rather idyllic childhood with their doctor father and demanding mother in 1930s Iceland. As young women Disa and Joka are sent to the Commercial College in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, which is where Disa becomes enthralled with cooking. Contrary to her mother's wishes she goes to England hoping to become a world class cook. However, the rift between Disa and her mother is an estrangement that will haunt.

Once in England Disa relishes and is emboldened by her freedom. She falls in love with Jakob, a German Jew, who has just completed his doctoral thesis. The pair give free rein to their passions, escaping to a small cottage in the English countryside. But, despite their thrall, they cannot ignore the distant rumblings that will soon shatter all of Europe.

Jakob fears for the safety of his parents, and returns to Germany in an effort to help them escape the Holocaust. But there is no deliverance; he, too, is consigned to Buchenwald.

Bereft and alone, Disa returns to Iceland where she takes a position as cook in the home of the wealthy Haraldsson family. There she is challenged to prepare tempting meals for the reclusive mistress of the house and confronts a mysterious adult son, Atli, who has just returned from Germany. No one speaks of Atli's activities in Germany. When Disa uncovers his secret, she derides herself for having been blind.

Later, some 20 years after the war she will again be in England where she will live with an old friend, Anthony, a gay squire. The two transform his family home into Ditton Hall, a respected country hotel, where Disa reigns supreme in the kitchen and oversees the hostelry's staff. Although she bridles at any criticism of her culinary art, she has indeed achieved her dream of becoming a first-rate cook.

Nonetheless, her emotional life is barren, her relationships with others tenuous as she buries her past, confronting it only when an unforeseeable event compels her to do so. It is then that she embarks on a last journey home to Iceland.

With The Journey Home Mr. Olafsson has created a work rich in imagery - the spare, unforgiving scenes of Iceland juxtaposed against the reassuring warmth of England's country summer. The inexorable march across Europe versus a kitchen fragranced by savory comestibles.

With Disa he has created a memorable character - her story haunts, her voice echoes again and again.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You can go home again, and you must., August 10, 2001

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey Home (Hardcover)

In the tiniest of vignettes, most only a page or two long, Olafsson creates a pointillist portrait of Disa, a middle-aged Icelandic woman, and the people and events from her past over which she still feels guilt and distress. She is on her way back to Iceland from England, where she and her friend Anthony have run a country hotel for many years, and where she has acquired a reputation as a fine chef. Her trip "home" is an attempt to find peace and to achieve the satisfaction of knowing her life has had meaning. This is an urgent quest--Disa has only twelve to eighteen months to live, and her life is full of unresolved traumas.

Olafsson uses the diary Disa keeps on her journey to intersperse sensitive, often powerful, memories from the past with her recollections from her more recent life in England. She is an intense and independent woman who sometimes reacts more sensitively toward the natural world around her than to the people with whom she has had relationships. We relive her estrangement from her mother and sister, her heartache in love, her love for her father and her secret life in Iceland, her protectiveness for her partner Anthony, her relationships with her employers and later with her employees, and her desperate romantic fling during a particularly vulnerable time. As in our own daydreams, we relive Disa's memories and the feelings they evoke in random order, not always knowing why they are important until later memories provide the keys to understanding. As her memories and nightmares intensify, the suspense grows. As Disa says, "The soul can take delight in small things if one's dreams only leave it in peace long enough."

Although Disa probably has enough traumas in her life for three novels, Olafsson avoids some of the usual pitfalls of romances by spacing out the details and requiring the reader to draw the conclusions. He tempers sensational revelations by including repeated images or symbols within them--apples, thrushes, storms, views from windows, music, the color red, the cold--to make us think. By the time the real reason for the trip to Iceland is revealed, most readers will have guessed it, but we sympathize with the unfortunate Disa and her journey, nevertheless. This is an emotion-packed rollercoaster of a novel, with a multitude of period details, sure to keep readers on edge. Mary Whipple

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Rendered, May 6, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Journey Home (Hardcover)

This is the first work I have read by. Mr. Olafur Johann Olafsson, however after reading, "The Journey Home", I look forward to whatever he presents next. The book is beautifully assembled but that does not keep it from portraying a complex woman who has bitter regrets, has suffered the horror of war, damaged familial relations, and at times almost self-imposed solitude.

The book is written in almost a series of notes, the protagonist actually carries a journal and mentions taking notes on her final trip home, however the book reads as if she always kept a diary. Not a day-to-day diary, but one that culls the highest and the lowest points of her life, and some that document her philosophy. The section that describes her thoughts on cooking and why a recipe should never be written down is simply brilliant. I would imagine those who cook would rarely take issue with her poetic thoughts.

The book is about a woman who is living out the estimated time of her remaining days. What was so enjoyable was that this did not portray some wistful mindless reminiscences, rather a woman who while admitting her mistakes, is basically content with the life she has lead. She is a confident woman and unusually so, for her thoughts of religion are the same as they have been for her life prior to illness, she does not make religion convenient, she remains true to what she has always been.

A very good book by an especially talented Author who wrote this volume from the perspective of a woman. I read a work by the Master Storyteller Mr. Roddy Doyle when he too wrote from a female's perspective, and Mr. Olafsson's work is every bit as good.