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Format: Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
Description
Young Lobbi was preparing to leave his childhood home, his autistic brother, his octogenarian father, and the familiar landscape of mossy lava fields for an unknown future. Soon before his departure, he received an awful phone call: His mother was in a car accident. She used her dying words to offer calm advice to her son, urging him to continue their shared work in the greenhouse tending to the rare Rosa candida.Prior to his mother’s death, in that very same greenhouse, Lobbi made love to Anna, a friend of a friend, and just as he readies his departure he learns that in their brief night together they conceived a child. He is still reeling from this chain of events when he arrives at his new job, reinstating the rare eight-petaled rose in the majestic forgotten garden of an ancient European monastery. In focusing his energy cultivating the rarest rose, he also learns to cultivate love, with the help of a film buff monk and his newborn daughter, Flora Sol. Read more
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Top Amazon Reviews
This short novel is told in a first person, stream of consciousness narrative. The narrator, Lobbi, is a young (22) Icelandic man who makes a long journey to tend the once famous rose garden of an isolated monastery that has fallen into disrepair. He leaves behind his 77 year old widowed father and autistic twin brother. Also left behind is a 4 month old daughter, born of a one night stand, that he has seen only once - the day she was born. The voyage to the monastery is fairly uneventful, apart from coming down with appendicitis on the plane and undergoing emergency surgery upon landing. Along the way, Lobbi encounters a couple of young women eager to jump into his bed, a fact to which he is strangely equivocal. He settles in at the monastery, revitalizing the garden by day and spending evenings watching movies and drinking all varieties of alcohol with Father Thomas, who finds answers to all life's questions in his sizable library of old films. The real story, however, begins when Anna, the mother of his daughter, arrives to drop off the baby for a few weeks. Anna decides to stay, and the rest of the book deals with the relationship that develops among Lobbi, Anna and their child. There is a muted quality to the narrative that is inconsistent with what one would expect from a 22 year old male, even one who chooses to be a gardener. Where are the raging hormones, the aggression, the restlessness? Granted, not every young man is a bull in heat, but everything seems a little off. Is he on valium? Does he share a mild form of autism with his twin brother; a touch of asperger's perhaps? After all, this is stream of consciousness, we are inside Lobbi's head, and even mild mannered, nice young men have poorly behaved thoughts from time to time, if not a good deal more often. About halfway through the book I became aware that the author, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, is a woman. This explains the vague inauthenticity of the narrative tone. It is not so much that the musings of Lobbi are not credible, but that so much is missing. I suspect that Olafsdottir was cognizant of the fact that there are vast regions of a young man's thoughts that were inaccessible to her, and she chose (probably wisely) not to go there. One fact that is never revealed is the location of the monastery. We learn that Lobbi is from Iceland only a third of the way through. The only other reference to any place is Lobbi's speculation that some writing on a shirt worn by Anna is Finnish. There are a number of clues, but they don't add up. After the plane ride, Lobbi has a full day's drive to the monastery, through an enormous, old growth forest and across three borders. The monastery is in or near mountains, but also close enough to the sea to have a steady supply of fish and seafood. The inhabitants of the small village in which the monastery is located speak a rare dialect of some unnamed language, and yet there is a halfway decent selection of books published in the dialect available at the local bookstore. Given that Lobbi started off in Iceland, one thinks naturally of Finland or one of the Baltic states. This is impossible, however, because Lobbi tells his father that the days are the same length year round, which means close to the equator. There is also a reference to the warm or mild climate. It is, in short, an imaginary location. Ultimately, the slight dissonance of the narrative does not detract at all from this eminently readable book. The plot is engaging and the writing is top notch (credit must also be given to the translator here). I found myself stealing time to get back to the story. I give it three stars. It deserves three and a half, and I am a tough grader.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2012 by M. G. Oneill
Now that it's finally available in English, beautifully translated by Brian FitzGibbon, I got the chance to read The Greenhouse. It's a truly remarkable novel, and its widespread acclaim as the 2010 book of the year was well-deserved. On the surface it is a first-person narrative that tells the coming of age story of Arnljótur (or "Lobbi"), a 22 year old from Iceland who goes on a journey to find himself. He is a thoughtful boy who studies in the family greenhouse "to be able to read close to the plants" and who thinks about what it might mean to "spend one's entire childhood waiting for a single tree to grow". His journey takes him from Iceland, which he sees as dominated by moss, tussocks and swamps, to a cliff-top monastery in an intentionally unnamed country that provides a stark contrast to his homeland. We hear him think through his bodily longings, what it means to be a man, fatherhood, faith, death, and our connections with the planet and the plants around us. And beneath all of this there is the question of how we relate to people, and how those relationships make us whole. There is the ever-present memory of Arnljótur's mother and the unforgettable final conversation that he had with her, as well as his evolving closeness to his daughter, Flóra Sól. Olafsdottir makes liberal use of symbolism, and most significantly there is the precious Rosa Candida, the violet-red, thorn-less, eight-petaled rose. Richness also comes from Olafsdottir's beautifully drawn minor characters. She captures monastic life wonderfully; in the absence of sustained contact with a broader community the small details of daily routines and of relationships mean so much to the monks. The villagers also are simple yet colorful. And there is Arnljótur's father, about whom you learn a lot from this one line: "When he's finished asking me about the weather and the traffic conditions on the roads, he tells me that seven depressions have crossed the country in about as many days." Finally, there is Father Thomas. If you're a fan of Indie and Art House films then you might enjoy this list of mentioned movies: 1. Cesar & Rosalie 2. Nostalghia 3. Trois Couleurs: Bleu 4. The Seventh Seal 5. Eat Drink Man Woman 6. Chocolat 7. Babette's Feast 8. Like Water For Chocolate 9. Chungking Express 10. In the Mood for Love 11. Je vous salue (Hail Mary) He Also mentions Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. His recommendations range from the bizarre (the movie with Yves Montana and Romy Schneider is César & Rosalie) to the more expected (Trois Couleurs: Bleu, in which the heroine, like Arnljótur, witnesses a horrific car accident, obsesses about death, and goes on a journey of self-discovery). Arnljótur emerges as an everyman with whom we can identify, and I hope that we will see more from Audur Ava Olafsdottir.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 31, 2011 by Tom Killalea