It’s been so long since I’ve posted on this site that this is perhaps an unnecessary announcement, but for all of you who have been kind enough to visit this site, read my reviews, and share your thoughts, I’d like to simply say that The Afterword is officially on hiatus. I’m still reviewing books, although mostly only Icelandic titles in translation, and for the time being, my blogging efforts are being dedicated to my other blog: ethandthorn.wordpress.com.
All the best,
Larissa
Very exciting news to share: Little Free Library Reykjavík was installed in Hljómskálagarður (the park along Tjörnin), next to the statue of Bertel Thorvaldsen on June 14, 2013! It’s a lovely spot for the library—there’s even a bench right next to it so that you can sit and browse through books and read while enjoying the summer weather in the park.
(Keep reading here.)
I recently had the opportunity to read and review Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason’s LoveStar, a novel which I wasn’t sure was going to be my style, but then ended up quite enjoying. My review was published on Three Percent, and is also below in full. I would highly recommend reading the interview that I link to in the first paragraph, too. A lot of interesting details there about Andri Snær’s early writing career and business strategies, which included a sales deal brokered with the Bónus grocery store chain.
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When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can recall such a time.) He noted as much himself in a recent interview with The Reykjavík Grapevine:
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My most recent published review…
March’s issue of the Grapevine featured a review of a wonderful book by yours truly (I wrote the review, that is, not the wonderful book), which is now available online. The book, Reply to a Letter From Helga, was written by Bergsveinn Birgisson, translated by Philip Roughton, and AmazonCrossing published the translation in January. It’s an epistolary novel, a love letter written by a man in his old age to the woman he loved in his youth. It is also a love letter to a way of life, a difficult and sometimes isolated way of life, farming in the country, but one in which relationships with nature and animals are just as important and often, just as fulfilling, as those that someone has with other people.
It isn’t always an easy book, but it is a very moving one. The writing is spare and precise, the relationships painted are…
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(Reblogged from Eth & Thorn)
The Little Free Library in Reykjavík will look a lot like this–I’m going to build it myself using a kit. The wood in the kit has been salvaged from a barn that blew down in a tornado 100 years ago!
Yesterday was a big day, everyone. And if you haven’t heard about why via the onslaught of emails, Facebook messages, giddy phone calls, etc, I’d like to share my new pet project with you now. (For those of you who already know about this–bear with me!)
I’m trying to build the first Little Free Library in Iceland. And I started my fundraising for this project yesterday. I now have just over a month to raise the €860 (about $1,165) that I need to make this project a reality. (I decided to have the fundraising end on my mom’s birthday, incidentally–so to double the fun, we’ll call it a long distance, honorific birthday present for her if I can make this happen.)
Now Larissa, you are saying: you are always rambling on about libraries. What is this Little Free Library thing all about?
Well, dear reader, I am glad you asked:
The Little Free Library project was started in Wisconsin in the USA. The idea is to place a small, weatherproof hutch, house, or other interesting structure (there’s one in an old fridge in New Zealand, and Berlin is making them out of hollow tree trunks) in a public place, fill it with books, and then let people come borrow and return them at will. It’s like your typical “take a book, leave a book,” but better because it is not just a place to discard old books and magazines that you don’t want, but rather, a thoughtfully curated mini-library which can bring together broad communities of readers in a new way.
Little Free Library has now become an international project, and it is estimated that there are between 5,000 – 6,000 “branches” in 36 countries around the world. But thus far, there are no branches in Iceland. Given my own interest in (tiny) libraries, (Icelandic) literature, translation, and creatively utilized public spaces, it seemed to me like a great idea to build the first Little Free Library in Iceland–specifically, in Reykjavík, which as you all know by now, is a very literary city. (In fact, I’m working on this project with Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature office, the City of Reykjavík library, and the Icelandic Literature Fund among others.)
I’ve included informational links about the project–the fundraising page, website, and Facebook page–below, but would be delighted to talk about this project further if it is of interest. Just send me a message and I’ll be totally thrilled to talk tiny libraries with you.
The Little Free Library Website: http://littlefreelibraryreykjavik.wordpress.com/
The Little Free Library Facebook Page: http://littlefreelibraryreykjavik.wordpress.com/
If you think this is a worthy project and can donate a little money to the cause, I will be extremely grateful (and will also send you a neat, probably handcrafted gift–see the first link for more info on that). If you are on the fence about why you, a reader who may not be in Iceland or have any immediate plans of visiting Iceland, might want to donate to this project, I encourage you to check out the Little Free Library Reykjavík FAQ page.
And donation or not: if you can share this project and its information with the library/literary lovers in your life, I would be immensely grateful. The success of something like this really depends on finding the widest audience possible–so thank you in advance!
Farsælt komandi ár, everyone, or: Happy New Year!
As I mentioned recently, I had the pleasure of reviewing Fridrik Erling’s Fish in the Sky for the December issue of The Reykjavík Grapevine. The review has now been made available online, which you can see here. Or, you can just read the full piece below.
Some interesting links and background context, for those of you who might be interested:
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“To actually cease being a child, that’s probably the greatest experience in life.” So thinks Josh Stephenson, the unusually sensitive and observant teen narrator of Fridrik Erling’s Fish in the Sky, a recent English translation of his novel Góða ferð, Sveinn Ólafsson. Josh has just turned thirteen and, according to his mother, is “one year closer to being considered a grown-up.” But getting older isn’t helping Josh make sense of life—it only seems to be complicating things.
Like most thirteen year olds, Josh occupies a purgatory somewhere between innocence and worldliness, regularly bouncing between pure joy and deep despair as he tries to navigate the seemingly insurmountable problems that crop up around him. First, there are his parents: his mostly-absent father who spends nearly all of his free time with his girlfriend or drinking buddies and his ardently religious mother who is too exhausted from working two jobs to pay much attention to his problems. Added to Josh’s list of worries are his rebellious older cousin—a girl—who moved in with Josh and his mom and is living in his closet, a vindictive math teacher, humiliating gym classes, the possibility that he has fallen in love, and the horrifying fact that he has started to get pubic hair. “I’m like a piece of bread in a toaster,” he thinks. “No matter which way I turn, all around me are the glowing iron threads that heat me up until I start to burn around the edges.”
Fridrik captures the profound extremes that characterize adolescence with a balance of poetical empathy and sly humour, all delivered through Josh’s sometimes wry and often perplexed observations. Of an irritating but popular classmate, Josh reflects that “It is unbearable how shameless and disgustingly free of low self-esteem he is.” While guiltily thumbing through a nude magazine he admits to finding “…at least two really hot descriptions of copulation,” which he doesn’t entirely understand. There is self-awareness and self-depreciation in Josh’s flailing attempts to reconcile with the world around him that ring very true to the teenage experience.
Although he spends most of the novel navel-gazing, Josh does undergo a significant transformation in discovering the simple truth that everyone has problems (many of which are more serious than his own), and everyone feels alone in them. The universality of this theme is further underscored by the fact that in the English translation, Fish in the Sky has very few orienting details that identify it as occurring in a particular country or even a particular time period. It’s worth noting that Fridrik completed the English version himself with reference to a translation by the late, great translator Bernard Scudder, to whom he dedicated the book. All of the character names have been anglicised, and while certain small details may hint at the original version’s Icelandic origins, it stands as a story that could have happened anywhere, to any young person.
Varney the Vampire Literary Remix, Cover via GalleyCat
This one’s just for fun…
Back around Halloween, GalleyCat, one of my favorite websites-about-all-things-literary, hosted its second annual Literary Remix Contest, which I am pleased to have participated in. The contest was sort of a large-scale Exquisite Corpse for writer-types. More specifically, from the contest description:
With the help from writers around the country, we will rewrite Varney the Vampire–a bestselling vampire novel from the 19th Century filled with enough star-crossed romance, vampire action and purple prose to inspire another Twilight trilogy.
You will rewrite a small section from the book your own unique style (from poetry to Twitter updates to cartoons to imitations of your favorite writer). We will publish and distribute the final product as a free digital book through Smashwords (complete with Victorian-era illustrations) so it will be available at the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBook Store, Blio.com and others.
I believe there may have been some sort of prizes involved for selected contributors in the U.S. (not me), which is why it was a “contest” but I think that everyone who actually submitted a page was included. That’s really not the point, though–it was just a lot of fun to take part.
The page I was assigned was a great selection in that it was actually a story within the main plot that one of the characters is reading, which means it was entirely self-contained. It was an exceptionally, delightfully dramatic story, a Hungarian Hamlet sort of tale in which a nefarious duchess and her lover, a nefarious count, kill off her husband so as to take over his fortune and position, and relegate her son to a dank mine. (The son–spoiler alert–survives with assistance from a fellow miner, and eventually gets his revenge.) I re-wrote this tale in a sort of epistolary fashion: mostly telegrams (“Varnegrams” for the purpose of this exercise), but also “Page VI” gossip columns, and even a bureaucratic memo written from an overseer in a dank mine to his employers. (Being a former office administrator, I excel at bureaucratic memos, so this bit was particularly fun.)
The e-book is now ready and available for download in a variety of formats, so if you have a yen for out-of-season Victorian Vampire fiction and/or collectively wrought pulp fiction, I’d encourage you to head over to the Smashwords page where you can download the remixed book for free.
(This post is being reposted from my other blog, Eth & Thorn.)
I am immensely proud to have two book reviews–of two separate books–published in two different English-language Icelandic publications this month. After writing about Icelandic literature from afar for so long, it really is very exciting to be taking part of the literary dialog from within Iceland.
One of the reviews is of Fridrik Erling’s Fish in the Sky, and is published in the current issue of The Reykjavík Grapevine. (That review is accompanied by a nifty little graph about the increase in Icelandic translations into English over the last three years which was created to go along with some data I compiled on this subject–all due credit to the very helpful translation databases maintained by Three Percent.) The Fish in the Sky review isn’t online yet, but I will post it when it is available, or you can download the .pdf of the issue here and find the review on page 19.
The other review, published in Iceland Review, is of Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s The Greenhouse, which was released in its first English translation in 2011. I actually reviewed the book when it came out for the above-mentioned site Three Percent, but liked it so much the first time that I was happy to provide a second review now. And actually, although I thought I would just skim through the book to reacquaint myself with it before writing the review, I ended up enjoying it so much the second time that I read it all over again in one day. So obviously, I’m a fan.
You can read the review on the Iceland Review website, here, and I’ve also pasted the full text below. (Full disclosure: some of the points covered in this new review are similar to those I raised in my previous piece. But there’s no sneaky business going on–I got permission for this beforehand.)
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Part road novel, part bildungsroman, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s The Greenhouse is a meditative story of love, death, fatherhood, and creating meaning in life even when it seems to be entirely dictated by chance. Published in English translation in 2011, it is the first of ten Icelandic novels that online retailer Amazon committed to publishing in the next year via its literature-in-translation press AmazonCrossing.
The Greenhouse opens on Lobbi, a young man to whom things seem to just happen—things which he is rarely equipped to handle. The last year has been particularly unsettling in this respect: first, his mother, with whom he was very close, died in a terrible car accident. Exactly a year later—after being unexpectedly conceived in “one quarter of a night, not even”—his first daughter was born. Feeling superfluous in the life of his child and misunderstood by his aging father, Lobbi is only really comfortable when he is gardening. And so, he decides to leave Iceland for an isolated monastery in a foreign country, hoping to restore a once-legendary garden to its former splendor and add to it a rare species of rose that he cultivated in his mother’s greenhouse.
Once Lobbi begins his journey, little goes to plan. He falls ill almost immediately after he departs and later gets lost and has to detour through a labyrinthian forest. He’s barely settled into his gardening routine at the monastery before the mother of his child arrives with his daughter, asking him to “bear [his] part of the responsibility” and look after the girl while she works on her graduate thesis. But instead of collapsing in this new role, Lobbi rises to the demands of fatherhood, and finds himself embracing such simple tasks as roasting potatoes and picking out hair ribbons.
Auður Ava is not only a fiction author, but also a practicing art historian. So it seems only natural that her prose is particularly visual in its descriptions, such as when Lobbi first arrives at his new village and sees the monastery on the edge of a cliff, “…severed in two by a horizontal stripe of yellow mist that makes it look like it’s hovering over its earthly foundations.” There is a tangible richness to each setting in the novel. Lobbi imagines the lava field where his mother died, visualizing a landscape of “russet heather, a blood red sky, violet red foliage on some small trees nearby, golden moss.” The cozy warmth of her greenhouse, a sofa among the tomato plants, contrasts with the forest Lobbi drives through “which seems endless and spans the entire spectrum of green.”
This evocative prose, fluidly translated by Brian FitzGibbon, provides a nice counterpoint to the simple but perceptive landscape of Lobbi’s continuous internal monologue. In the end, his own transformation mirrors that of his beloved roses, echoing his mother’s gardening philosophy: “it just needs a little bit of care and, most of all, time.”
Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve been a big fan of Per Petterson since his affecting novel Out Stealing Horses was published in English translation in 2007. Following the astounding success of that novel, we’ve been lucky enough to have a good deal of Petterson’s backlist published in English, as well his most recent novel, I Curse the River of Time, which in my opinion, deserves all the praise received by Out Stealing Horses, and then some more.
Graywolf Press has now brought out a translation of It’s Fine By Me, Petterson’s third novel, which was originally published in Norway in 1992. I reviewed the novel for Three Percent, which you can either read on their website, or see in full below.
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It’s Fine By Me
Per Petterson, Translated by Don Bartlett
On an early morning in Oslo in 1970, Arvid Jansen shimmies up his high school flagpole and replaces his nation’s flag with that of the Viet Cong. Confronted by the headmaster in front of his classmates, Arvid takes the opportunity to expound on the evils of the U.S. occupation of Vietnam and Norway’s complicit foreign policy, all the time being observed from a far corner by his good friend Audun Sletten. “I guess it’s all very important,” Audun shrugs, “but I am up to my neck in my own troubles, and it almost makes me want to throw up.”
Frequent readers of Per Petterson have by now come to know Arvid Jansen rather well. In typical Petterson fashion, Arvid’s life has been examined in alternating atemporal versions set forth in In the Wake and, most recently, in the masterful I Curse the River of Time. Arvid is often the vehicle through which the author explores and recasts episodes of his own past—“[h]e’s not my alter ego, he’s my stunt man,” Petterson stated in a 2009 interview with The Guardian. Vulnerable, self-absorbed, and made miserable by hindsight, Arvid is an incredibly sympathetic character. If for no other reason than this, then, English readers should be delighted to now have access to one of Petterson’s early novels (first published in Norway in 1992): It’s Fine By Me.
Arvid is a prominent character in the novel, but it isn’t his story. Rather, it’s that of his troubled friend Audun, a young man who, with his “real problems”—a violent and drunken father who is, luckily, often absent; a beloved but drug-addicted younger brother, killed in a car accident; a lonely single mother struggling to support her children; and numbing jobs with long hours and little respect—is the actual embodiment of the working class hero that Arvid has so frequently wished to be. But as seen through Audun’s eyes, there’s nothing in the least romantic about his situation in life.
“It’s fine by me,” (reminiscent of Elliot Gould’s own cynical chorus of “It’s okay with me,” in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of The Long Goodbye) is Auden’s go-to retort, forced in its apathy when pretty much everything that he remarks on is anything but. In fact, Audun cares a great deal about what happens around him—cares about his sister who he thinks may be in an abusive relationship, cares about a neighbor whose brother is getting into drugs, cares about Arvid and his family, cares about doing well in school, and literature, and Jimi Hendrix, and woodsy hideouts where he felt safe as a child. But isolating himself and not caring—or at least giving the appearance of not caring—is far easier and exposes him less.
Although there actually is quite a lot in the way of plot happenings, It’s Fine By Me is a rather familiar, somewhat anticlimactic coming-of-age narrative where the ‘what’ matters far less than the ‘how.’ This is by no means Petterson’s strongest novel, nor should it really be expected to be—it was, after all, one of his first. But although the flashbacks and overlapping memories fold together less seamlessly than in other Petterson novels, although the emotional pitch is generally less subtle (lots of capital letter exclamations when people are angry), and the visual metaphors more overdetermined (a beautiful runaway horse, turning just before it knocks over young Audun and Arvid), the novel is still compelling, and sometimes even quite funny. (A scene in which Audun and Arvid have to figure out how to put gas in Arvid’s father’s car is particularly delightful.) Petterson’s characterizations are always both sharp and empathetic, his prose measured, poetic, and visual. One feels connected to Audun—truly concerned for him—and yet, due entirely to Petterson’s writerly sleights of hand, the reader can distinguish between what has become entirely compressed and unified in Auden’s mind: run-of-the-mill teenage angst and real, emotional (and physical) trauma.
Through it all, Petterson allows for a quiet hopefulness, the possibility a better future for Audun. There is resonance in the clichéd assurances of a sympathetic neighbor: “You’re not eighteen all your life,” he tells Audun. “That may not be much of a consolation, but take a hint from someone who’s outside looking in: you’ll get through this.”
The Afterword 