A portrait of an artist trapped by convention and expectations but longing for the chaos that can set her free.
Growing up on a farm in early twentieth-century rural Iceland, Karitas Ólafsdóttir, one of six siblings, yearns for a new life. An artist, Karitas has a powerful calling and is determined to never let go of her true being, one unsuited for the conventional. But she is powerless against the fateful turns of real life and all its expectations of women. Pulled back time and again by design and by chance to the Icelandic countryside—as dutiful daughter, loving mother, and fisherman’s wife—she struggles to thrive, to be what she was meant to be.
Spanning decades and set against a breathtaking historical canvas, Karitas Untitled, an award-winning classic of Icelandic literature, is a complex and immersive portrait of an artist’s conflict with love, family, nature, and a country unaccustomed to an untraditional woman—but most of all, with herself and the creative instincts she has no choice but to follow.
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“Although set in the twentieth century, Karitas’s story speaks to the trials of a modern woman as well?how to balance childcare and art, how to care for a home while your husband is absent, how to love a man who is bad for you but who says all the right things…Her story reflects that of all women, past and present, Icelandic and beyond.”
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San Francisco Book Review