Kristjana gunnars biography of nancy

by Monique Tschofen

You and I both know identity
is a nebulous thing.
(Gunnars, "the real postmodern")

The story of this writer’s life tells of a woman in a form of perpetual motion — motion across continents, motion between cities, and between jobs, but also motion of a higher sort¹.

She has travelled throughout the traditions of world literature in her readings, journeyed through a wide range of forms and genres in her writings, always exploring the emotions of loss and longing and love. Because so many of Kristjana Gunnars’s writings play with the structures of autobiography and reveal the traces of these motions and emotions, it might be tempting to read her work seeking direct correlations between the writer and her writing.

To thus limit one’s engagement with these highly intelligent and complex works would, however, be a mistake. While Gunnars begins with the personal, she has consistently and self-consciously interrogated just what writ