'Butterflies in November' by Auður Ava Olafsdóttir (Review - IFFP 2014, Number 8)

After three preliminary wrap-up posts (here, here and here), a short piece comparing the IFFP and the BTBA, and a guest post from one of my fellow Shadow Panelists, it's finally time to get my Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Journey for 2014 off to a proper start.  Today, we're heading off to Iceland, so buckle up - it might be a bit of a bumpy ride...

*****
Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Olafsdóttir
Pushkin Press (translated by Brian FitzGibbon, PDF review copy from the publisher)
What's it all about?
Butterflies in November is a story about a winter holiday that doesn't quite go as planned.  A multilingual translator comes home from a final tryst with her lover, only to find out that her husband wants to divorce her - to move in with his pregnant lover...  She takes his decision surprisingly calmly and takes the opportunity to go off on a trip to clear her head, hoping to head overseas for some fun in the sun.

Before she even gets out of Reykjavik, however, the fates conspire to change her plans a little.  Firstly, her friend points her in the direction of a fortune teller, who has some surprising predictions for her.  Then, her numbers come up in the lottery, providing both the choice of her destination and the money to get there.  Finally, she is saddled with an unexpected travelling partner - with her friend confined to a hospital bed in preparation for the birth of twins, our heroine is forced to drag four-year-old Tumi along with her on a very special road trip...

The central character, whose name we never learn, is a fairly unusual person.  She's scatter-brained, yet linguistically talented, translating in and out of Icelandic from and into eleven foreign languages.  Perhaps because of this talent, she is emotionally distant, seemingly unable to connect with other people on a 'normal' level.  Even when her marriage is falling apart, she can't help detaching herself from the situation:

"Thank you," he says, "I'll never forget you."  This is the third time he's said this to me in as many days.  Someone ought to tell him he is starting to repeat himself.
p.71 (Pushkin Press, 2013)

Perhaps, then, the point of the trip is to learn to reconnect with the people around her, and Tumi, another unusual character, is just the boy for the job.  His premature birth has left him with weak eyesight and severe hearing loss, and he's a child most people simply overlook and ignore.  However, the translator makes an effort to see into his private world, even going so far as to learn sign language (not a hard task for a hyperpolyglot...), and in doing so, she opens herself up to people in a way she hasn't for quite some time.

One of the novel's strengths is the insights it gives into Icelandic society, in particular the smothering nature of an island community, where it's hard not to bump into people on a regular basis.  Privacy seems not so much overrated asa foreign concept, with casual acquaintances knowing all about your life in advance (several of the translator's friends are aware of her divorce before she is...).  For someone who lives in a bookish world, this kind of community could easily come to feel more than a little claustrophobic - the trouble is that it's very hard to find a space outside that bubble.

The plot has more than a few similarities with the only other of Olafsdóttir's books available in English, The Greenhouse.  Both feature a protagonist who seeks distance to work out what's happening in their life, only to be unexpectedly landed with a child.  However, the tone used is very different; where The Greenhouse is a sweet tale, always threatening to bubble over into saccharine, Butterflies in November is much drier:

"Although I can't really boast of any extensive experience in this field, I know there is no correlation between sex and linguistics, I've learnt that much." (p.18)

Perhaps the dry tone merely covers up a deeper insecurity, but the translator deinitely seems to have a harder shell than most.

Having come to the end of the journey (on the iconic Icelandic ring road...), the reader sees the translator in the final pages on her way back to where she started.  Of course, there have been changes, and that is what the author seems to be implying; while we often appear to end up back at square one, everything we do in life has a small effect on us, whether we want it to or not.  Even a November holiday ;)

Does it deserve to make the shortlist?
No, not really.  It's a pleasant enough read, but even after eight books, it's not in my top six, and I'm sure it will continue to fall.  For a 250-page novel, it really takes a while to get going - in effect, we are left waiting 100 pages for the story to start, when the translator sets off on her holiday.

I also felt that the tone was a little weak as I was never quite sure if it was meant to be warm or biting, often falling between the two and not really satisfying anyone.  Another weak aspect was the characterisation, with the men the central character meets being very hard to distinguish (perhaps deliberately).  In a book where the writing was effective, but nothing special (despite a nice, clear English version from FitzGibbon), it really needed to provide the reader with a lot more.

Will it make the shortlist?
I doubt it.  There are some great books on the longlist, including a far superior Icelandic novel and a few great books from female writers - I really can't see the judges placing this above nine of the other books.  Unless, of course, this is the particular hobby horse of one of the judges, and they force it through.  Stranger things have happened (*cough* Bundu)...

*****
So there you have it - we're off and running!  Funnily enough, my next post will continue the theme of travel as we spend a few hundred pages on the run from the authorities.  See you in China ;)

'The Sorrow of Angels' by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Review)

After enjoying the excellent Heaven and Hell recently, I was eager to dive into the next instalment of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's trilogy set in the wilds of Iceland.  It's a bit risky sometimes, reading a sequel of a book you really liked, as the possibility of being disappointed is always at the back of your mind.  Luckily then, I have very good news for those of you who liked the first book - this one is better :)

*****
The Sorrow of Angels (translated again by Philip Roughton, review copy courtesy of MacLehose Press) picks up very shortly after the end of its predecessor, with the boy settling in to his new home in the cold, isolated village.  Taken in by the beautiful Geirþúður, he is beginning to enjoy a more comfortable life, his days spent helping housemaid Helga with domestic tasks and reading translations of Shakespeare to the blind sea captain, Kolbeinn - that is, when he's not flirting with the beautiful young Ragnheiður.

However, this semi-civilised existence is interrupted one day by the arrival of the local postman, an arrival which is both comical and serious at the same time:

"Helga looks down at Jens and the horses, all three nearly unrecognisable, white and icy.  Why don't you come in, man? she asks, somewhat sharply.  Jens looks up at her and says apologetically: To tell the truth, I'm frozen to the horse."
p.17 (MacLehose Press, 2013)

Once the burly postman has recovered from his ordeal, he decides to set off on another long trek, deputising for a sick colleague.  With a long, arduous journey ahead of him, some of which will involve rowing across treacherous fjords, it is decided that Jens will need a companion this time if he is to make it back in one piece - and so the boy sets off into the wilderness once more...

From the very start, The Sorrow of Angels grabs the reader's attention and doesn't let go for the next three-hundred odd pages, sweeping them up and taking them on a guided tour of the writer's creation.  The first part of the book is set in the village, and as well as meeting familiar faces and hanging around inside old haunts, the reader is introduced to a few new people as Stefánsson widens the circle of our experience.  One highlight is getting to visit the local hotel and restaurant, drinking with the local intelligentsia (the schoolmaster, the watchmaker) while the local big-wigs (including Ragnheiður's father...) dine in another section.

As interesting as this is though, we soon sense that this is merely the introduction, and that the restless Jens will soon be setting out again into a hostile landscape - and if you thought the boy had problems in the first book, think again.  Compared to the journey he undertakes in The Sorrow of Angels, his first trip through the mountains was a walk in the park...

The false comfort of the village gives way to the reality of life outside the small settlements people have created to protect themselves from the elements.  This is Iceland in the nineteenth century, and the reality is that many people live far away from company, isolated (literally) in their sturdy cottages, buried beneath the snow for the extent of the winter.  How long is the winter?  Well, it's hard to say.  In some places, it's difficult to know if spring ever comes at all.

When Jens and the boy stumble across these outposts of civilisation, islands of warmth in a sea of endless snow and driving winds, they become the centre of attraction, sources of news and novelty, people to talk to (often, the first company in months).  In an age of instant gratification, with digital downloads and online grocery shopping, it's confronting to see people thirsty both for letters and books, and for coffee - using the last of their precious grounds to warm up the unknown visitors...

...and they certainly need warming up.  Much of the novel takes place on the heaths, with Jens and the boy lugging the postbags from farm to farm, a task made more difficult by the constant snow storms and the ever-present threat of freezing to death.  The titular 'sorrow' refers to snow, but while it certainly brings sorrow, at times it also entices, invites, the weary traveller to sink into its embrace.  It is little wonder that the further the two wanderers get from civilisation, the greater the feeling they have of not being alone in the storm - out on the wiley, windy moors, indeed...

Bleak?  Unreadable?  Not at all.  The Sorrow of Angels is a beautiful book, one you need to savour - a novel to read over a good few days.  It's certainly one I enjoyed reading and coming back to after a break.  Once again, Stefánsson's writing is wonderful (and if that's the case, it's also important to acknowledge Philip Roughton's immense contribution in bringing it into English).  He has a wonderful, light touch with words, and most pages had something I was tempted to mark for inclusion in my post:

"Stars and moon vanish and soon day comes flooding in, this blue water of the sky.  The delightful light that helps us navigate the world.  Yet the light is not expansive, extending from the surface of the Earth only several kilometres into the sky, where the night of the universe takes over.  It's most likely the same way with life, this blue lake, behind which waits the ocean of death." (p.24)

It's a beautiful idea, and one which sums up the themes of the novel.

Which isn't to say that Stefánsson isn't equally adept at changing the mood and tone, adding a wry aside for the reader's enjoyment.  As mentioned in my review of Heaven and Hell, there's a touch of Saramago in his style, and the book is full of witty one-liners:

"Kjartan would curse roundly if he dared, but God is, despite all else, higher than all storms and men; he hears everything, forgets nothing and collects his dues from us on the final day for every thought, every word, every touch, every detail.  It can be tedious and downright depressing to have such a God hanging over one; we'll likely exchange him as soon as something better is available." (p.188)

Or how about:

"The dead are egoists, making the living toil for them, as well as filling them with guilt for not doing so well enough." (p.287)

There are plenty more where those came from...

Alas, while Stefánsson is a master of his game, I am but a poor scribbler, out of my depth when describing books like The Sorrow of Angels, so I'll leave it there with just a few more words to help emphasise my feelings about the book.  To the publisher: please submit this for next year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  To next year's IFFP panel: please shortlist this book.  To the wider audience out there: please read the book - it's great :)

'Heaven and Hell' by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Review)

Last year, as some of you may remember, I was on a bit of an Icelandic kick and managed to read several great books from the small island nation.  One I didn't get around to though was a book by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, a novel which several bloggers had raved about.  With the sequel, The Sorrow of Angels, out now, I thought it might be time to correct this oversight - and luckily, the good people at MacLehose let me have a copy of both :)

*****
Heaven and Hell (translated by Philip Roughton) is the first in Stefánsson's trilogy about a character known only as the Boy.  We begin with preparations for fishing for cod in the cold sea off the north Icelandic coast, in a team of six with his friend, Bá­­ður (a literary type who seems out of place in such a functional setting).  We're in the mid-nineteenth century, but it could really be back in the seventeenth century; life seems very basic - and harsh...

After a night of waiting and preparing, the fishing crews set off into the unwelcoming waters, and disaster (inevitably) strikes.  Sickened by the attitude of the other fishermen in the face of tragedy, the Boy sets off on a perilous journey back to a distant village, not caring if he survives the journey or not.  There he finds that in a land that doesn't appreciate outsiders, he's not quite as alone as he thinks...

Heaven and Hell is a great story with superb writing.  The first part of the book is dominated by the struggle between the fishermen and the sea.  The waters are a living entity: cruel, cold, deadly and majestic.  The poor sailors in their tiny 'sixereen' are at the mercy of something far greater than themselves, trusting their fate to 'an open coffin on the Polar Sea'.  Just returning to shore can be considered an achievement:

"And those on shore do not passively watch the boats land but instead lend a hand, there is a law beyond man-made laws because here it is a matter of life and death, and most choose the former."
p.75 (MacLehose Press, 2011)

For those who enjoy descriptions of man versus wild, this is the real thing, and the writer creates a poetic description of the battle for life.

On land, things are little better.  Near the shore, the village lies under almost perpetual snow, and the atmosphere amongst its inhabitants can be just as cold and forbidding.  There is a fixed hierarchy, where the owners of the big stores have entrapped the little people in their eternal debt, and the poor villagers live on a diet of credit, subservience, gossip and infidelity.  Outsiders are regarded with suspicion, and anyone a little different tends to drift into a certain circle, one centred upon the enigmatic Geirþúður.  Which is where the Boy comes in...

Stefánsson has a striking style, reminiscent at times of Saramago (a saga Saramago?).  His writing can be jerky, confronting and involved, with frequent rhetorical questions and addresses to the reader:

"A tidy man, that Pétur, like his brother, Guðmundur, skipper of the other boat, about ten metres between their huts but the brothers don't speak to each other, haven't done so in a good decade, no-one seems to know why." (p.16)

Another feature of the writing is superb imagery.  Stefánsson has a great eye for detail, and the reader is sucked into the pictures he creates, be they in the midst of a storm or in the snug of the local pub:

"This was in the evening, a dense cloud of cigar smoke in the room, they could barely see each other, or at least until one of them came up with the idea of opening the window onto the autumn and the sky coughed when the smoke was sucked out." (pp.118/9)

The narrator of the story occasionally switches eyes, following other characters away from what we have come to see as the 'centre' of the story.  When it leaves the Boy and accompanies another of the villagers or fishermen, it appears like a disembodied spirit (which, if we believe the narrative's frame, is exactly what it is...).

Heaven and Hell reminds me at times of a couple of the books I read last year.  In parts, particularly in its description of the hardship of life in Iceland, it is reminiscent of Halldór Laxness' Independent People.  The first section, with the focus on the importance of fishing is more akin though to a Faroese novel, Heðin Brú's The Old Man and his Sons.  Like many of the Icelandic books I've read, particularly those set in the past, it also emphasises the importance of books, stories... and coffee!  However, while coffee can cure all ills, literature is seen as the cause of disaster - poetry can be dangerous...

"Some poems take us to places where no words reach, no thought, they take you up to the core itself, life stops for one moment and becomes beautiful, it becomes clear with regret and happiness.  Some poems change the day, the night, your life.  Some poems make you forget, forget the sadness, the hopelessness, you forget your waterproof, the frost comes to you, says, got you, and you're dead." (p.85)

Please take care when reading...

Heaven and Hell is a great book, but it's hard to discuss the novel without giving it all away as very little actually happens over the course of the two-hundred pages.  Unlike many books, this one really feels like the first part of a trilogy, a set up of more to come.  Which is not a bad thing at all - I, for one, will be diving into The Sorrow of Angels very soon...

...just as soon as I've sorted out some thicker thermals ;)

Books and Dreams

From the first of November, things will be going all Germanic around these parts with the start of German Literature Month.  However, before that all starts, I just have time to bring you one last taste of Iceland, and a wonderful one it is too :)

*****
Gyrðir Elíasson's Stone Tree, translated by Victoria Cribb, is another short story collection that the wonderful Comma Press were kind enough to send me a copy of.  Unlike the others I've reviewed though, Stone Tree's offerings are more akin to flash fiction - the 116 pages contain 25 different stories.  These vignettes work superbly though, describing slices of life, glimpses of a moment in time like a photograph, or a video lasting but a few brief seconds.

Not a lot happens in some of the stories, but the reader is still intrigued as to why events unfold (and are set up) as they are.  For example, in A House of Two Stories, two men living on different floors in the same house translate different books by the same author - and that's it.  Elíasson's skill lies in sketching this out in a few hundred words in such a way that the reader feels that there is something more to the story than this and is engaged enough to wonder what exactly that could be.

The literary theme is one that runs through the collection (a comforting one for bibliophiles like myself!), but the stories can often contain subtle warnings about the danger of becoming obsessed with literature.  In Book After Book, a story which may hit too close to home for many readers, a man wanders about his house aimlessly, picking up some of the many books he possesses.  Some are in the fridge, some are crammed into boxes, others share the bathroom cabinet with prescription medicine...  While he is certainly not lacking for reading material, the man's world is eerily flat and empty.  Perhaps it's no coincidence that I took sixty books to the local charity shop the day after reading this story...

Readers may get a mention, but one of the central ideas of Stone Tree is the writer, a solitary figure seeking time alone in an attempt (usually a vain one) to squeeze some words out onto the page.  In several of the stories (e.g. The Summerbook, The Flight to Halmstad), this search for necessary tranquillity comes at the cost of relationships, with marriages slowly disintegrating in the absence of human contact.  In others though (e.g. The Writing Room, The Bus), the writer's solitude allows him to connect with something outside his usual world, his dreams bleeding uncannily into his waking existence.

If this all sounds a little dull and arty, rest assured that Elíasson is not without a dry, laconic sense of humour.  There are many gems scattered throughout his stories, such as:

"On the little table beside the bed an ancient coffee maker boiled and bubbled, producing a strange, black viscous fluid that we decided by tacit agreement to refer to simply as coffee, although in reality it was something altogether different."
p.48, The Writing Room (Comma Press, 2008)

Or, perhaps you would prefer the writer's attempt to describe beautiful scenery:

"It was past midday when their car pulled up beside the houses of Saksun.  The sky was overcast but no rain was falling here and the mountains were free from fog.  Saksun is an extraordinary, romantic place.  It would have been the perfect setting if Keats, Shelley and Byron had ever needed a retirement home."
p.81, Watershed

Scattered jokes like these help to prevent the stories falling into a humdrum, predictable pattern - and also keep the reader on their toes :)

With such short, mystery-laden pieces of prose, it will come as little surprise that Elíasson is also a poet, and in an interview published back when Iceland was the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, he admits his tendency towards 'anorexic prose', an influence of his poetic writing.  This poetic side comes out in a comment a character makes in his story The Carpentry Woodshop, after the death of his sister:

"Later, when things were almost back to normal, Dad said that I should have carried on and joined him in the carpentry business.  I answered that two carpenters in the family were enough, and that I would take up woodwork again if he could build a stairway to heaven.  He said he couldn't do that.  I said in that case I would weave one out of words."
p.78, The Carpentry Woodshop

Of course, even the most poetic and lyrical of writers is nothing in a foreign language without the help of a good translator, and Victoria Cribb is one of the best.  I have praised her work before (she is the translator into English of Sjón's work), and even if Elíasson has a very different style - dare I say it, a little less flamboyant... -, it still comes across well in the foreign language.  I'm not sure if Cribb has translated any other Icelandic authors, but I'm almost inclined to seek them out and read them just on her name alone :)

*****
All in all then, Stone Tree is a wonderful collection of stories, a fitting end to this stage of my journey around Icelandic literature.  Before I finish up though, I just want to look at one more story, one which I came back to time after time.  Chain Reaction is just three pages long, yet it is full of hidden meanings, a puzzle which the reader longs to crack.  It's another of the stories which centre on a writer at a retreat, where the protagonist, hearing the sound of chains in the attic, leaves the house and goes for a walk, ending up sitting by a pool.

So far, so prosaic.  However, it's the detail which fascinates me so much in this story.  The writer flees immediately he hears the sound of chains - does he have a guilty conscience?  In leaving the house, he locks himself out, the keys are still inside - is there a deeper significance to this?  The book he (inevitably) takes with him is a biography of Houdini...  As he approaches the pool, he compares a cave to the one where Merlin was stranded after losing his powers - an allegory for writer's block?  The name of an old girlfriend pops into his head, and a light immediately comes on in a building in the distance.  And I haven't even mentioned his dream yet...

You cannot help but admire the way Elíasson almost casually throws all these elements together in fewer words than it has taken me to review his book.  Despite the brevity of the tales, these are not stories that you speed through; with all the dense imagery, the reader needs to slow down and take heed of what is happening.  Rob, of Rob Around Books, a noted fan of the short story, wrote earlier this year about the way he always reads a short story twice, recommencing immediately after finishing the first read.  At the time I was, to put it mildly, a little dubious about this - however, this is pretty much what I did for the majority of the stories in Stone Tree.  And it works. 

Stone Tree is a great book.  Elíasson is an excellent writer.  This (as far as I am aware) is his only work in English.  More, please :)

Everything's Coming Up Roses

When I first started my bout of Icelandic reading, I asked for a few recommendations, and my readers were happy to oblige.  Aside from the usual suspects of Halldór Laxness and Sjón, a book which came up a few times was Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's novel The Greenhouse, one of many Icelandic works published this year by Amazon Crossing.  The winner of several awards, both in Iceland and elsewhere in Europe, it seemed like a good way to continue my current obsession...

*****
The Greenhouse (translated by Brian FitzGibbon) introduces us to 22-year-old Arnljótur Thórir, a young Icelander who is about to embark on an exciting journey into the unknown.  Having inherited a love of horticulture from his mother, Lobbi (as his father calls him) is all set to fly off to a new job in an unspecified European country, restoring a world-famous rose garden in a monastery.

While he is taking a trip into the unknown, what he is walking away from is a little clearer.  He is still getting over his mother's untimely death in a car crash a couple of years back and is leaving his over-protective father and his Autistic twin brother behind.  Oh yes, and there's the small matter of the result of a few hours of passion in the family greenhouse - his baby daughter, Flóra Sól...

After a slightly unfortunate (and painful) start, Lobbi embarks on a lengthy, unhurried journey to the rose garden, somewhere in the heart of Europe.  As he drives through forests and villages, meeting new people on the way, you start to wonder if he's ever going to get to his destination.  Once he arrives at the monastery, the pace continues to crawl, but that's a good thing - as Lobbi himself discovers, it's the journey, not the destination that counts.

The Greenhouse is very much a Bildungsroman, one in which our young friend takes time out from the world to look around and think about what it is he wants from life.  In leaving his home territory and transplanting himself (like the roses he takes along) into a foreign climate, Lobbi is forcing himself to confront his issues.  It's very much a step into the unknown, at times coming across as a bit of a fairy-tale, as he discovers small restaurants hidden in the woods and tries to fit into the world of the monks.

This all makes him reevaluate his situation, the new experiences helping him to compare his old life with the new one.  It's a very different environment to the harsh Icelandic landscape:

"Can a person who has been brought up in the heart of a thick dark forest, where one has to beat a path through multiple layers of trees just to take a letter to the post office, have any conception of what it's like to spend one's entire childhood waiting for a single tree to grow?" p.62 (Amazon Crossing, 2012)

Then, just as he is adapting to his role as a rose gardener, he receives an unexpected visitor...

I greatly enjoyed The Greenhouse; it's the kind of book ideal for a couple of afternoons lounging about somewhere warm and slowly making your way through the pages.  The writing (and translation) is excellent, and there's also a dry sense of humour underpinning the story, with Lobbi (and his red hair) the butt of many a subtle joke.

He's a typical 22-year-old, sexually charged to the point of distraction, but also fairly shy, meaning that he misses certain obvious signals from women (a running joke is that several people actually think he's gay...). He's also constantly cringing from comments people make about the child he fathered from what he calls "a half-night stand" - every time he shows a picture of the blonde baby to the dark-complexioned natives, he is told that she doesn't have enough hair... 

There's a lot to like about this book, but it's not perfect.  A twist about two-thirds of the way through threatens to turn an intriguing, slow-burning story into a twee piece of chick-lit, but luckily the writer manages to keep the sugar to a minimum and comes up with a resolution to the story which works and satisfies the reader.  Still,it does feel like a bit of a girly book at times.

Nevertheless, The Greenhouse is a novel that most people will enjoy, literary enough to intrigue but with a character the reader cares about.  The man we see at the end of the 260 pages is very different to the immature youth we began the novel with; and if his future isn't quite settled, we can be sure that he's on the right path.  Everything (literally) is coming up roses :)

Something A Little Like Life

After a short break, it's time for another trip to Iceland, this time courtesy of the good people over at Portobello Books.  Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir's novel The Creator (translated by Sarah Bowen) is a strange, but entertaining novel, describing what happens when a woman meets a man - one with an unusual profession...

*****
We begin in the small town of Akranes, where Sveinn a middle-aged artisan, has just finished an exhausting bout of work on his creations.  As he moves to the kitchen to prepare his dinner, he sees a woman outside his house, struggling with a flat tyre.  Despite his fatigue, he invites her in, shares some dinner and drinks with her, and changes the tyre.  When he wakes up the next morning, the woman is gone - and so is something else.

You see, Sveinn hand-makes life-sized sex dolls, and when Lóa, his unexpected visitor, stumbles across one in his workshop, she decides to take it.  A rather unusual decision, you may say (and you'd be right), but there is a method in her madness, and it all has to do with her daughter, Margrét.  In her hungover state, Lóa thinks that her daughter, who is withdrawing from all human contact, may be able to relate better to a doll than people...

What follows is a bizarre tale, swinging back and forth between Akranes and Reykjavik, one which never quite goes the way you'd expect.  The idea of the sex doll, while important for the plot, is a bit of a red herring; The Creator is not so much about sex as it is about loneliness and longing.  All of the main characters in the novel are adrift, looking for a little attention and affection.  Sveinn's friend, Kjartan, looks for it in the shape of dolls; Lárus, a young man who gets caught up in Sveinn's mission to retrieve his goods, just wants a friend.  And as for Sveinn and Lóa...

Both have failed relationships behind them and are trying to fill the gaps in their lives (Sveinn with work, Lóa with alcohol), hoping to stop the slide before their lives crumble into pieces.  By the time the doll maker tracks down his visitor in Reykjavik, her world is already in tatters, and Sveinn finds himself having to help her hold it together.  The two seem perfect for each other - however, the fact that Sveinn thinks that Lóa is a stalker may well get in the way of a blossoming friendship.

Mínervudóttir has structured The Creator by writing chapters alternating between Sveinn and Lóa's points of view, a technique which allows the reader to see events through two pairs of eyes.  With the characters often speaking at cross purposes, it's a clever trick, one which is carried on successfully throughout the novel.  Although at times it has the effect of slowing the narrative a little too much, the skillful way in which the writer manipulates the conversations more than makes up for this.  Often it is only after hearing both sides of the story that the reader is able to gain a clearer (but never clear) understanding of what has happened, as both Sveinn and Lóa only recall parts of the conversation, omitting certain details and exaggerating or distorting others.

Although Lóa is dismissive of Sveinn's work, wondering why he would waste his talents on such a distasteful trade, he is proud of his work, confident that he can maintain the distinction between dolls and women.  As the book progresses though, it becomes painfully obvious that this is not strictly true.  On several occasions, he describes Lóa as if she were a doll:

He observed the woman sitting opposite him at the table more carefully.  She resembled typical drawings of the first women settlers: large round eyes and big shapely bosoms that rested firmly on a sturdy, solid torso, and legs like two magnificent pillars. p.11 (Portobello Books, 2012)

There's nothing sexual about his descriptions of the woman sitting opposite him - these are merely the detached musings of an artist at work...

The Creator is an entertaining and thought-provoking work, one I'm happy to recommend.  If you're looking for resolutions or happy endings, you'll be disappointed (there aren't any), but in this way the book is more reminiscent of real life than of a novel.  People change when drama occurs, but only incrementally.  Real change is a slow process, and the most you can hope for in a short period of time is a catalyst to make you stand back and have a good look at your life.  This is the effect of the events running through The Creator; whether Sveinn, Lóa and co. actually benefit from their encounter is a story for another day.

A Promise is a Promise...

In the middle of my recent spate of Icelandic books, I read Sarah Moss' Names for the Sea, a non-fiction book about a year an English woman spent in Iceland.  While entertaining, it was very much an outsider's view of the country and left me wishing that there had been a little more insight into Icelandic life.

Which is when I spotted another book on the subject, this time written by a man who had spent much of his youth shuttling between Iceland, England and Australia.  Luckily enough, I was able to obtain a review copy from the publisher, University of Queensland Press (UQP), to see how the insider's point of view compared to the outsider's...

*****
The Promise of Iceland was written by Australian university lecturer Kári Gíslason, possibly to work through some of the events of his earlier life.  Gíslason was born in Iceland to an Anglo-Australian mother, the result of a lengthy affair she had with a married Icelandic man.  Despite the welcoming attitude of most Icelanders to any child, Gíslason's mother decided to respect the wishes of the reticent father, keeping his identity a secret for the best part of three decades.

As surprising as this decision was, what was even more astonishing was that the son also decided to respect his mother's wishes, refusing to break his mother's promise, even though it caused financial and social hardship.  Iceland is all about family, and being unable to acknowledge your heritage makes you an outsider in a country which should be your own.  Shuttled between England, Iceland and Australia, young Kári grows up with his secret, unwilling to tell any of the friends and family who would have been only to eager to help out.  Until, one day, he finally decides that it's time for everyone to face the truth...

The Promise of Iceland is a compelling narrative, exploring Gíslason's early life and providing a welcome insight into Icelandic culture.  Many of the features appearing in other Icelandic books I've read are highlighted here, such as the small, closed society and the relative freedom of childhood.  When Gíslason's mother, Susan, is pregnant with her son, she fears that her status as a single mum will cause her problems with her employers - which is not the case at all.  In fact, her surly boss is very happy for her (as is her landlord):

It was a conversation that was repeated almost word for word when she spoke to her landlord, Brynjólfur, about whether she would be able to stay in her apartment in Sólvallagata.
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Now that I'm having a baby."
"What did you think we'd do, dear?  Kick you out?"
That's exactly what she'd thought.  She couldn't quite believe that a child could be so welcomed. p.72 (University of Queensland Press, 2012) 

In England or Australia in 1972, Susan would almost definitely have ended up homeless and unemployed...

As you may have gathered, for much of the book, The Promise of Iceland is just as much about Susan as it is about Kári himself.  In telling us about her, the writer attempts to make the reader understand why he agreed to keep her promise.  After only reading the blurb, I idly wondered why he thought he had the right to break this promise at all.  Once I'd actually read some of the book, I was more amazed at his even considering not outing his father.  The writer attempts to explain his reasoning for making his own promise to his father at the age of seventeen:

The point is that I wanted to do the right thing, by both my parents and my country.  I wanted to do the loving thing and, in 1990, it seemed positively wrong to be the ruin of his family life. (p.130)

Later his attitude changes as he comes to feel that he has been robbed of the family life he deserves.  We feel his tension as he returns, once again, to Iceland, this time to meet his half-brothers and sisters...

*****
There are obvious comparisons with Names for the Sea, and the same themes pop up, whether it's the attitude towards children, the obsession with coffee and knitting, or Reykjavik's small-town atmosphere (at one point the writer regularly bumps into Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in a shop - a woman who was the country's President at the time!).  In other ways though, Gíslason's background means that The Promise of Iceland is a very different book.  Moss was a tourist; Gíslason was a (semi-) native.  Moss visited the distant Westfjord islands; Gísalason lived and worked there.  Where Moss was frustratingly introspective at times, Gíslason opens the country up for us.

All of which makes The Promise of Iceland an excellent work.  Well written, fascinating and absorbing, the book pulls the reader along on Kári's search for closure and fulfilment, making us hope he can find the acknowledgement he's after.  You may think that the issue would have lost most of its significance after so much time, but you'd be wrong.  You see, for much of his life, Kári's family name was Reid, one belonging to the man his mother married (and was separated from) long before her son was born.  Gíslason is actually the patronymic derived from the name of his father, Gísli.  Just by using his full name on the cover, the writer is showing how much his identity means to him...

If You Go Down to the Woods Today...

A while back, Stu from Winstonsdad's Blog was lucky enough to have a Q & A with Sjón, the Icelandic writer whose book (From the Mouth of the Whale) we chose as our Shadow IFFP winner.  Among the many gems uncovered were Sjón's recommendations for further reading in Icelandic literature - namely Halldór Laxness' The Fish Can Sing, and Kristín Ómarsdóttir's Children in Reindeer Woods.  I read one of Laxness' books a few weeks back, and as luck would have it, I had also just received a review copy of Ómarsdóttir's novel from Open Letter Books.  Consider this a post with the Sjón seal of approval ;)
 
*****
Children in Reindeer Woods (translated by Lytton Smith) is a slightly bizarre book with a highly explosive start.  On a nice sunny day, somewhere in the country, a trio of soldiers walk up to a house.  The inhabitants come out to greet them, smiling happily...  then, one by one, they are gunned down.  The three soldiers go into the house, but only one walks out alive - and the only other person to escape the carnage is an eleven-year-old girl called Billie...

Alone on the farm, Billie and Rafael, the surviving soldier, attempt to draw up some kind of boundaries, rules for establishing a fragile coexistence.  Their relationship is a forced, somewhat strained one, with neither quite sure what the other is actually doing there, both settling for a temporary life which excludes the outside world.  As the summer goes by, the two begin to enjoy each other's company in their blissfully bucolic existence.  If only all these people didn't keep dropping in uninvited...

If the start is confusing, don't expect the rest of the book to provide many answers.  The writer appears to have deliberately set out to create a novel in which very little can be recognised or taken for granted.  We are told that there is a war, but we have no idea who is fighting.  We know that we are in the middle of nowhere (later we find out that it it is 1100 kilometres to the nearest city), but where exactly this nowhere lies is less certain.  The lack of ideas to hold onto makes reading Children in Reindeer Woods extremely disorientating.

When Billie and Rafael venture out of the house, this feeling intensifies.  The two drive out over Ceaseless Heath, down through the Endless Pass and look out over Forever Valley.  Reindeer Woods appears to be located within a bubble in space and time (or in a Beckett play...), and this sense of placelessness gives the whole book, and every action in it, a sense of unreality. 

Even the names of the characters don't really give us much to go on.  Billie, Rafael, Soffia, Abraham, Marius... It's as if Ómarsdóttir has deliberately chosen a collection of unrelated foreign names to further obscure the true location of her story.  And while we know that Rafael is a soldier, it's unclear whether he's still in the army, or if he has decided to run away from the (invisible) war.  As for Billie, for most of the book, we have no real idea why or how she ended up in the house.  I don't think we're in Iceland any more, Toto...

Another way in which Ómarsdóttir creates her web of confusion is the language her characters use.  Billie's strange mix of over-formal expressions and slang can be explained by her age and the unfamiliar circumstances, but Rafael's speech is just as unsettling.  In his conversations with one of the visitors, the language constantly swings between registers, changing from friendly, to formal, to suspicious in a heartbeat.  The result is that we are constantly on eggshells, never quite certain that bloodshed, or something just as ominous, isn't just around the corner...

So what's it all about, you say?  The impressionability of youth?  The confusion of war?  Your guess is as good as mine.  Children in Reindeer Woods is an absorbing book, one which is more disturbing than entertaining, in the sense that the reader can never settle down with the feeling that this is what the author is getting at.  It's a book which requires (demands) rereading - whether it will give up its secrets on a second attempt is questionable though...

One quotation, however, might give a clue as to what Ómarsdóttir is trying to say:

"In war, the murders committed by the victors are unimpeachable - the same way as the insane are not held responsible for their crimes." p.128 (Open Letter Books, 2012)

In a story where many, many, mad, bad things happen, the reader is asked to decide who is responsible and how far we can blame them for their crimes.  While, none of the people we meet in Reindeer Woods could be described as completely sane, perhaps we need to ask ourselves who, exactly, is mad here?

No, it makes no sense to me either ;)

The Importance Of Being Independent

As you may have seen from my recent posts and comments, I am on a bit of an Iceland kick at the moment, and if you are that way inclined, sooner or later you are going to end up reading a book by the country's undisputed number one writer - Nobel Prize Winner Halldór Laxness.  I'd never tried any of his novels before, but I was determined to see if his work was as good as many say it is - and luckily my local library was able to get me a copy of his most famous novel...

*****

Independent People (translated by J.A. Thompson) is a 544-page epic, cramming two decades of life on the harsh lands of the Icelandic interior into a superb novel.  It's the story of Bjartur, an agricultural worker, who after eighteen years of hard service to the local farmer has been able to set himself free and buy some land to start his own small croft.  Our newly independent man is in for a tough life, battling not only the elements (and in Iceland that would be bad enough on its own), but also the unforgiving land, the greed of richer farmers and, of course, the supernatural.  This is Iceland after all...

If anyone can manage this though, then Bjartur of Summerhouses is that man.  A taciturn being of Viking stock, he is determined to make a go of things and stand up straight, regardless of what the weather and the local spirits throw at him.  In a wonderful introduction to the novel, Laxness takes us through the history of the croft, telling us all about the evil murderess Gunnvor and her refusal to take death quietly.  Then Bjartur comes striding onto his land...

"No," he said defiantly...
And as he passed Gunnvor's cairn on the ridge, he spat, and ground out vindictively: "Damn the stone you'll ever get from me you old bitch, " and refused to give her a stone. p.18 (Harvill Press, 2001)

He then proceeds to climb a hill to survey his domain:

"Standing on the highest point of the knoll, like a Viking pioneer who has found his high-seat posts, he looked about him, then made water..." p.19

In the shadow of Gunnvor's cairn, Bjartur proceeds to mark his land - territorial pissings indeed...

In the coming years, Bjartur will need to show all this strength of purpose to survive.  In a land where Easter is often celebrated in snow, getting the sheep (the key to his survival) through the winter in one piece is a mammoth task.  Luckily, as the years pass, he is helped in this task by his family, eventually being joined by four children, three sons and one daughter, Asta Solillja.  However, as the children grow towards maturity, some of them are shown to have inherited their father's strength of character and stubbornness - and not all of them want to live a life of Bjartur's making...

Independent People is a wonderful book, a mini-saga written (and translated) in clear prose, a marvellous tale of an environment which appears almost alien to comfortable 21st-century city dwellers.  As much as the book is about Bjartur and his family, it also foregrounds Iceland itself.  The country's interior is another of the book's characters (one of its more important ones) and is almost Hardyesque in its importance to the story.  As well as living off the proceeds of his work and the land's generosity, Bjartur feels a more intangible connection to the place he lives in:

"But the high heath had also a value for this man other than the practical and the economic.  It was his spiritual mother, his church, his better world, as the ocean must inevitably be to the seafarer.  When he walked alone over the moors on the clear, frosty days of late autumn, when he ran his eyes over the desert's pathless range, and felt the cold clean breeze of the mountains on his face, then he too would prove the substance of patriotic song."  pp.102/3

Easy as it is to get carried away with romantic pastoral fantasies though, the reality is that life in Independent People is hard.  Iceland is an isolated wilderness, primitive in comparison to the rest of early-twentieth-century Europe, and the awful weather conditions, combined with an absence of electricity, running water and home comforts, meant that just keeping yourself warm and healthy was a major task.  Without giving too much away, death was just as much of a certainty as cold winters and wet feet.

The country was also a colony at the time, to be exploited by rich Danish merchants, and part of the interest in Independent People is seeing how things begin to change over the course of the years.  The richer farmers form a co-operative society which challenges the primacy of the banks, and eventually the native people begin to take more responsibility for their own affairs, culminating in the first steps to independence for the country in 1918.  It's fascinating to see how Iceland's rise to independence is aided by the slaughter elsewhere in World War I - the country is able to export its lamb and mutton for astronomical prices, using Europe's misfortune to improve its economy.  Not for nothing do the farmers call it "The Blessed War'...

One thing does not change though, and that is Bjartur's insistence on the need to be independent.  Having laboured for eighteen years to finally escape servitude, he isn't likely to give up his freedom in a hurry.  As he tells his wife: 

"Independence is the most important thing of all in life.  I say for my part that a man lives in vain until he is independent.  People who aren't independent aren't people."  p.41

And that, perhaps, is what it all boils down to: is it better to life in servitude and comfort, or freedom and poverty?  For Bjartur, it's a question that only has one possible answer.

Notes from a Cold Island

As most of you will know, I'm a keen advocate of literature from all over the world, with my interests jumping around from country to country (although I always come back to Germany and Japan eventually).  My most recent obsession is writing from Iceland; I've read several books from the country already this year, and there are plenty more to come.  Which meant that when I was made aware of the book in the photo, I just had to take a closer look - especially as I wasn't quite sure if I was supposed to read it or wear it...

*****
Sarah Moss' Names for the Sea (review copy received from Granta Books) is a travel book about a year the writer recently spent living in Iceland.  At the end of her first year of university, many moons ago, she travelled around the country with a friend and always intended to pay a second, longer visit.  When an opening came up for a lecturer at the University of Iceland, she decided that it was the perfect opportunity to move her family away for a while - goodbye Canterbury, hello Reykjavik :)

Unfortunately though, her timing could have been a little bit better.  You see, Moss took up her position in Reykjavik in the middle of 2009, right at the heart of the global financial crisis.  Iceland,  previously one of the wealthiest (and smuggest) countries on earth, was faced with a devalued currency and a lot of belt-tightening (meaning that Moss' salary was suddenly worth a lot less than she'd been expecting).  It also happens that during her time abroad, one of Iceland's volcanoes decided to erupt, showering the country with ash and causing havoc with European airspace...

The writer and her family had more important things to worry about though.  While the volatility of both the Kronur and Eyjafjallajökull was unexpected, the culture shock was a much bigger problem.  Moss had to come to terms with a country where people are very suspicious of outsiders, lax in keeping an eye on their children and seemingly unable to indicate at all when driving.  Add to this the fact that the weather keeps you inside for much of the year, and you can see that life in the frozen north is not as idyllic as Moss had hoped.  And then there's the food...

Moss is a novelist, and it shows.  Names for the Sea is well written with excellent pacing, and is story-like at times.  As the book progresses, the reader is taken deeper and deeper into Icelandic society and culture, learning to look beneath the surface at the same time the writer does.  At first glance, there is no sign in Iceland of the Kreppa (the collapse of the Icelandic economy).  In a proud, equal society, happy to be different from the rest of the world, the natives continue with their disposable culture, their love of big cars (and disdain of buses) and a distinct lack of second-hand goods.

A little digging though shows that things are not quite as rosy as they appear.  As Moss gets to know the country, and the people, better, she is able to delve into the invisible cracks in the society.  She learns of a charity depot and sees people receiving food parcels on her visit.  She hears of violence towards women and the true crime statistics, surprising in a country where women have apparently broken through the glass ceiling.  Eventually, she also finds out more about Icesave, the plan to compensate foreign investors for the money the collapsed Icelandic banks took from them - and discovers that not everyone is happy to foot the bill...

Names for the Sea is a great read for anyone interested in Iceland, but there's a lot more to it than that.  The fact that Moss has uprooted her family and dumped them in a foreign environment means that there are additional pressures to the ones we expect to find in travel writing.  As well as coping with a new job, there is also the small matter of placing two young children in schools and playgroups.  In addition to learning a new language (although that is not particularly necessary for English speakers in Iceland), the writer is forced to start from scratch, furnishing a rented apartment with no car, little money and scant knowledge of local shopping customs.  I don't envy her.

However, especially in the first third of the book, I don't particularly sympathise that much either - you see, it may just be me, but I don't think she always comes across too well.  While she can recognise her cultural limitations with a wry smile at times...

"Get over it, I find myself unfairly thinking, able to identify someone else's whingeing where my own complaints are obviously those of a normal person presented with weirdness." p.115 (Granta Books, 2012)

...at others she appears oblivious to how annoying and elitist she sounds.  For example, when packing for a move to Iceland, I certainly wouldn't be opting for:

"...five litres of olive oil, a dozen tins of anchovies and a dozen jars of capers..." p.14

When she then opts to leave the toaster at home, I begin to sense that Ms. Moss and I move in different social strata...

There's more to this than a gourmet unwilling to settle for bland food though.  Her smuggling of food through customs (and the smug way in which she does so) grates, and comments like the following (made about her sons daycare hours)...

"We extend his hours, but not much, not to Icelandic levels, because we still know best." p.69

...indicate someone who, at heart, believes that she is right, and that they (whoever they may be) are wrong.

This passes though, and it's tempting to think that Moss (the writer) has created Moss (the character), a woman whose arrogance is tempered the longer she stays in Iceland.  Certainly, once the claustrophobic winter is over, and there is more opportunity to travel and meet the natives, the style changes.  The book becomes more about the country and the problems it faces than the writer's issues with settling down in an unfamiliar environment.

Overall, Names for the Sea is a very good book, informative, thought-provoking and well written.  It's a shame that Moss was unable to stay for longer than one year, as more time spent in Iceland would probably have led to an even deeper understanding of the natives.  Of course, no matter how long you spend in a country, you're unlikely to uncover all of its secrets (after a decade in Australia, I'm not even close...).  In one of her classes at the university, Moss discusses travel writing with her students, telling them:

"Home... is the paper on which travel writes.  Travel writers are always writing home." p.110

The more I think about Names for the Sea, the more fitting this information becomes.  As much as the book is about its subject, it also says a lot about the writer...

Warm Words and Cold Hearts

I'm not sure if this happens to anyone else, but whenever I read a good book by a writer from another country, I immediately want to read more, not just from that particular author, but also from his compatriots.  The point to this long, and rather overcomplicated, opening sentence is that after enjoying Sjón's work I was on the lookout for more Icelandic fiction - which brings me to today's review :)

Twice in a Lifetime is a collection of short stories by Icelandic writer Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson, one I noticed on the website of Comma Press and requested a review copy of.  It's a slender volume, comprising ten stories running to just over 120 pages, set in Iceland over the past few decades, and it's a book you could run through very quickly indeed.  It's probably best though to space the stories out, and that is how I approached the book.

Many of the stories feature modern men, some behaving very badly.  In Exchange of Guilt, a man whose happy existence is based on his brother's misfortune takes advantage of his luck to iron out a problem which his own behaviour has caused.  Of course, when you try to cheat fate, there's always the chance that fate will try to cheat you back. Another unlikeable character is the protagonist in The German Teacher's Wife , an arrogant young student who looks down on his girlfriend but uses her to finance his studies abroad - until the money suddenly runs out...

However, not all of Sverrisson's main men are like that.  In A Sweet Shop in the West End, a man in his thirties tries to connect with his step-son, reminded of his own relationship with his mother's partner.  While this part of his life seems to work, his beautiful wife, at first so loving, appears to be taking advantage of his good nature.  In The First Day of the Fourth Week, a contemporary story of post-GFC Iceland, a man made redundant tries to fill his day, unable to cope with the unexpected feeling of unemployment, waiting for something, anything, to turn up...

These two stories reminded me a little of some in Clemens Meyer's collection, All the Lights, and while Meyer's characters are, on the whole, a little more working class and down on their luck than Sverrisson's, there is a strong resemblance in the ground the two writers tread.  The stories deal with real life, nothing too exotic or flamboyant; in fact, were it not for the occasional reference to geothermal energy and Kronur, you could have trouble placing the stories geographically.

One element which ties the stories together is a sense of retrospection, many of them being specifically dated.  Quite apart from Lunch Break, 1976 (the shortest of the stories, one in which a stressed-out office worker comes home and has a rant about a sheep's head left in a saucepan...), several of the stories have the year clearly stated, as if the writer wants to impress the importance of the time from the start of the very first page.  While there is no explicit sense of nostalgia, the reader gets the sense that we are meant to be looking for something in the past, something which has perhaps been lost.

On top of this preoccupation with the past, several of the stories focus on problematic relationships, marriages that have run their course.  In addition to the stories mentioned above, After the Summer House, the longest of the stories in the collection, focuses squarely on a marriage in crisis.  It takes place over a few years in which a couple visit their friends in the country during the summer holidays.  On the first visit, their friends' marriage seems to be strained; on the second, they have built their dream summer house and appear to be much happier.  But is everything really OK?  And how does this reflect on the protagonist's own relationship?

This story was probably my favourite of the ten.  It deals with the way relationships change and what people have to do to keep them fresh, and make sure they continue to work.  The protagonist here is a man who prefers to live in his own world, lost in old magazines and music, and he doesn't realise that this is probably not the best thing for his continued happiness.  I think I'll move on before it all gets a bit too close to home...

Before I wrap up though, I should mention the translators - particularly important as there are three of them!  Most of the stories are translated by the team of Maria Helga Guðmundsdóttir and Anna Benassi, but The First Day of the Fourth Week (which appeared in a previous Comma Press collection) is translated by Vera Júlíusdóttir.  The stories are easy to read, but the style sometimes switches between being slightly formal and more colloquial - an aspect which I suspect is more down to the writer than the translators :)

Twice in a Lifetime is well worth a read, and I'm hoping to have another look through it soon as I suspect there are still more secrets there to be uncovered.  As for Iceland, well, I'm definitely hoping to make a (literary) return trip in the near future.  Any suggestions will be gratefully received :)

The Hunter and the Hunted

Having read both From the Mouth of the Whale and The Whispering Muse over the past few months, I was tempted (as mentioned in a previous post) to return my copy of Sjón's final translated work, The Blue Fox, to the local library unread - so that I could read it another time.  In the end though, I couldn't bring myself to do it as I was desperate to read more of the Icelandic writer's tales... and I'm very glad I didn't...

*****
The Blue Fox (published by Telegram Books, translated by Victoria Cribb) is set in Iceland in 1883 and begins with a short chapter describing a hunt over snowy, mountainous terrain.  The Reverend Baldur Skuggason is in pursuit of a blue fox, a rare creature in these parts, and he is determined to bring down his prey.  Over thirty, sparsely-filled, poetic pages (a story which could easily stand alone as a work of fiction), man, fox and nature battle for supremacy in a fight to the death.  But this is just the prelude...

We then move back a couple of days and are introduced to the rest of the characters, among them the educated Fridrik B. Fridriksson and his housemaid Abba.  Fridrik has just finalised the arrangements for his poor servant's funeral after her premature death (related to her Down's Syndrome), sending the coffin off to Reverend Skuggason with the vicar's half-wit assistant.  This part of the story initially appears to have little to do with what precedes it.  When we are granted glimpses into Fridrik's past though, especially of the time when he encountered Abba, the writer begins to drop hints that there is more connecting the two parts of the story than you would expect at first glance...

As we move backwards and forwards in time, learning more about Fridrik's history, life in the small Icelandic town and the epic hunt across the snowy landscape, the writer slowly reveals his intentions.  While the first section of the book appears to show a simple, but elegant, battle of wits between Skuggason and the fox, later events show that things are not quite so clear cut.  The more we read, the more we have to wonder - who exactly is hunting whom?

You've probably guessed this already from the few paragraphs I've written, but I loved The Blue Fox.  It's a slight work, just over 100 pages, many of those containing very little writing, but it is so much more than that.  While barely managing to reach novella length, it is constructed with more flair and imagination than you'd find in most works of five times the size.  At times, particularly in the first part, the text resembles poetry more than prose, black paw-prints punctuating the snow-white expanses of the page, with Sjón's trademark dry humour never far from the surface.  A good example of this is:

"The night was cold and of the longer variety."

p.12 (Telegram Books, 2008)

By the way, that was the whole of page 12...

Once again, praise has to go to translator Victoria Cribb.  I loved her work on the other two Sjón books I've read, and this is another excellent piece of writing, a flawless effort which never feels like a translation.  A token example?  Oh, go on then...

"There was a whining in the air.

     A ptarmigan hurtled past, a hair's breadth from the man, driven before the wind.  It was followed by a falcon, flying high with sure and steady wing-beats.

     The man turned away from the blast, tightened his scarf and wrapped the shoulder strap three times round his right arm so the bag rested tight against his hip.

     He was not too late for the storm." p.12

I think that one thing above all shows how much of a fan I am of Ms. Cribb's work - I didn't even have to open the book to check the translator's name :)

There are a lot of things which I could say about The Blue Fox, but there really isn't much point because it's a short book, and most of the fun would be spoiled by my laying the plot even barer than I already have.  It's great - read it.

Off you go now...