Einar Már Guðmundsson

A person I met in Iceland said this was their saddest contemporary novel. It’s about a man who spends years in a mental asylum in Reykjavik, watching as several of his friends commit suicide. Eventually he kills himself.

It is desolate, but I don't think its humor makes it less so. I have the impression the author thinks humor brightens or relieves the tragedy, and several reviewers have said the same thing. To me, that's a mistaken estimation of the place and power of the kind of gentle show more absurdism that stands for humor in this book. That kind of simple laugh at fate, embarrassment, coincidence, or circumstance can't possibly lighten the passages in which the author, writing in the voice of a man who is chronically depressed and sometimes schizophrenic, meditates on the emptiness of his mind, of the landscape, and of the few people he knows who are still alive. Even so, reviewers -- and, I gather, the author himself -- thinks the scattered humorous episodes counterbalance the bleakest images of the sea, the waves, the stars, and the deaths of the narrator's friends. Does that mean he is so used to black imagery that he experiences trivial jokes as relief? Or that he is so entranced by trivial jokes that he gives them a redemptive power? I would have liked this better without the sense that absurdism, surrealism, or humor somehow alleviate the narrator’s pain. I have a hard time understanding how the authors thinks about humor: if it’s ultimately ineffectual, why keep returning to it? If it is effective, how is it possible to explain how an ocean of unhappiness is brightened by a second-rate joke?

For me the most interesting aspect of the novel is its fragmentary narrative. The author, Einar Mar Gudmundsson, begins chapters with anticipations of things to come, and then circles back to explain them. Chains of those cycles constitute the book's structure. Within each cycle the book progresses in page-long or even sentence-long "pieces" of narrative: prose poems, narrative fragments, quotations, and scenes separated by white spaces. Some of those "pieces" contribute to the stories, or add to our anticipation of what happens next, or help build our sense of the characters. Other pieces are self-contained because they are jokes; they end with punch lines. But there is a third principle at work in the cutting and arrangement of the "pieces," which is the most intriguing: their abrupt transitions and their unfinished feeling are intended as signs of the narrator's mental state. After all, the protagonist is himself suffering from delusions and blackouts, and he was incarcerated for years in a mental asylum. He is an undependable narrator, and the nature of his undependability is exactly what is expressive about the book. It matters that some fragments end where his self-awareness ends, and that others end where his own experiences ended. As we read past those breaks, we are reading into blacked-out spaces and times in his own experience, which can be very poignant. It is the written analogue of listening to someone who is very ill, as they drift in and out of coherent speech. The problem is that I'm not convinced that Einar Mar Gudmundsson is in control of that device. Sometimes the fragments are typical novelist's compositional devices; sometimes, as I said, they are vehicles for jokes -- so it is not always possible to tell if the sudden gap in a story, the sudden change of subject, is intended to express the narrator's mental state, or whether we are to take it as part of the novel's construction. If I could have been sure of that, I might have found this even sadder, more heartbreaking, than other reviewers have found it. show less

Heillandi lýsingar af örbirgð og uppvexti forfeðra höfundar en verður dálítið sundurlaus þegar hann reynir að fylgja þeim öllum eftir því sem nær dregur í tíma.

Absolutely stunning. Beautiful beautiful prose and an unforgettable narrator with a heartbreaking frozen tale from the wasteland of his mind. One of the most amazing short novels I’ve ever read.

What to know how Iceland could go bankrupt? The read and learn from this brilliant book, written on the authors anger of the corruption and neglect that lead to the financial break down in Iceland.