Looking at the grave of the invisible man

Björk’s new album is deservedly getting a lot of attention, but there is another, much quieter release from an Icelandic artist – literally quieter. It’s not an album, it’s a poetry chapbook. Wait! Don’t go! I know what it sounds like. It sounds like photocopied, stapled pages sold out of a backpack on the sidewalk by attractive yet poorly groomed, self-absorbed youths. If you buy a copy (out of an impulse to support the arts, and greatness might appear anywhere, even in a homeless kid; or you want to help the homeless; or simply because you’re charmed by the poet’s combination of sincerity and homemade tattoos) inside the pages you will find verses without rhyme or meter or quite possibly, meaning. I know. That’s usually what it means. But I’m talking about Sjón here.

Reykjavik Writing Jam

I took a Reykjavík city break last weekend without ever leaving Seattle, thanks to the Taste of Iceland event sponsored by Iceland Naturally and KEXP (among others). After visiting the Odin’s Eye exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum, the next item on my itinerary was the Reykjavik Writing Jam.

Book Report: The Story of the Blue Planet

My latest dive into Icelandic literature is The Story of the Blue Planet by Andri Snær Magnason, translated by Julian Meldon D’Arcy. At first every Icelandic novel I read was infuriatingly opaque. But with this book, I feel like I’m starting to get the Icelandic novel. Now the dreamlike atmosphere that so confused me in The Children of Reindeer Woods has started to feel familiar; sometimes I can tell when something is supposed to be funny; sometimes I can even decode the symbols. Of course, Blue Planet is a kids’ book.

Book Report: 101 Reykjavík

You’re supposed to read the book first. The movie is never as good and it will limit your imagination when you do read the book. I know this. But I watched Baltasar Kormákur’s movie, 101 Reykjavík, before I knew it was based on Hallgrímur Helgason’s novel. I really liked the movie. It felt a lot like an Icelandic Slackers; that’s the primary difference between the book and the movie.

Book Report: Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell is a ghost story. No, that’s not true. Heaven and Hell, by Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson, is merely narrated by ghosts, a tragic chorus of post-mortal souls belonging to an isolated fishing village, who bear witness to one boy’s tragic loss of his only friend.

Heaven and Hell is a quiet, internal novel about a few crucial days in the life of a lonely boy who loses his only friend. No, that’s not true. In Heaven and Hell, translated by Philip Roughton, the boy’s friend, Bárður, makes a fatal mistake while preoccupied with the words in a borrowed book, and the boy risks his own life to return the copy of Paradise Lost. These are only the events in the book.

Heaven and Hell, like the book that killed Bárður, is an epic poem revolving around the very central questions of existence: Why bother living, when it is so hard? Why should we who live be allowed to do so when so many others are dead? Is it even possible to be truly alive when we are truly alone?

When there is a choice between life and death, most choose life.

This much is certain. But almost nothing else is.

Book Report: The Greenhouse

The Greenhouse, by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, is instantly appealing, so it’s no surprise that Amazon Crossing chose to release Brian FitzGibbon’s translation. Its shy, modest protagonist has spent the years or so since his mother’s death caring for his aging father, his autistic twin brother, and his mother’s greenhouse, where he has cultivated a rare eight-petaled rose. Now he is leaving to take a job restoring the rose garden of a medieval abbey in an unnamed European country.

Book Report: The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning

 

Iceland has one of the richest literary traditions in the world, and it is a tradition that is alive and well today, as evidenced by several oft-quoted statistics about literacy rate, books read per capita per year, and the highly debated “1 in 10 authorship” claim. Reykjavík is a UNESCO City of Literature – the first non-English speaking city to receive the title. And therein lies the rub. Almost all of that literary activity is occurring in a language that, aside from a few medievalists, no one outside of a small, sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic can understand. In such a tiny, saturated market, even record sales are not enough to guarantee a novel’s translation into English, and so most of the world remains unaware of Iceland’s tremendous literary output. Hallgrimur Helgason decided to fix that.

Book Report: The Perfect Landscape

 

After several perplexing Icelandic novels in a row, it was a breath of fresh air to read a straightforward, plot-driven narrative. Whew! Icelanders still tell stories after all. Fun stories about creativity and mystery; intrigue in the fine art world.

Book Report: The Pets

Now that I have read something by each of the Iceland Writers Retreat featured authors, I am moving on to the Icelandic authors who are involved in the event. Not all of them are available at my library, but of the ones that are, the first to arrive at my local branch after I placed a slew of holds was The Pets by Bragi Ólafsson, translated by Janice Balfour and published in English by the literary translation press Open Letter.

I have to say, I’m not sure what to make of it.

Book Report: LoveStar

In the week running up to Iceland Writers Retreat, I really dove into Icelandic fiction. It turns out that Icelandic novelists can be pretty challenging, even when their books are fun. By the time I read Andri Snær Magnason’s dystopic novel LoveStar, my head was reeling – which is a shame, because LoveStar was right up my alley, and I wish I could do it justice. In all likelihood, I won’t be able to summarize all the ideas that LoveStar stirred up in my head, so let me just start by saying, “Read it.”