Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.06.2004, Blaðsíða 13

Visitors
welcome!
Art shows in Landsvirkjun’s power stations enrich travel in Iceland
Open all afternoons thissummer. For more informationsee www.lv.is or call515 9000
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Laxá station - north Iceland
Sightseeing and leisure
A visitors‘ centre has been set up at the Krafla
Station with videos outlining its history.
Faces of Thjórsá Valley
For 1100 years.
In the vaults
The face of ignorance, pride and
arrogance, devils and imps from the
series Whims (Los Caprichos) In co-
operation with the Akureyri Art Museum.
Sultartangi Station - south IcelandKrafla Geothermal Station
Exhibit of photographs
Natural beauty in the human environment.
Open from June 5 on. Exhibit of oil paintings
will open in July.
Holy cow!
Art exhibit - one picture for each day of the
entire “Great Cow Year of 2003.” Open every
day from June 12.
Blanda station - north IcelandLjósafoss station - south Iceland
The Nordic gods
Sculptures by Hallsteinn Sigurdsson
and information about the Nordic
gods and their view of the world.
EINAR MÁR
by Bart Cameron
Along with writing two of the first sophisticated Icelandic
screenplays, six novels and a Nordic Prize-winning memoir, Einar
Már is frequently referred to as the father of the modern, popular
Icelandic poetry. I ask him to explain his effect on poetry to those
who don’t read Icelandic. “It was just more sparse, my style. We
were influenced by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Baudelaire, the English
Mercy Poets, the Beats...”
Quiet, Confident and Ignored in America
Einar Már Gudmundson is driving
me back to 101 Reykjavík from his
suburban home in his soccer mom-
style SUV. He turns off the Icelandic
news and puts on a full-band, late
70s Dylan album.
“Bob Dylan is an outsider, too. Or
maybe he is just an insider every-
where. He is from…” and then it
starts again, “HMMMMMMMM,”
louder and louder for about two
minutes. “Hmmmmmm,” as we
drive past Breiðholt. And I finally
interrupt and say “A small town
outside Duluth, Minnesota.” And
he says “Hibbing, Minnesota. You
see, small town. Everybody is always
traveling to find the center of things,
and so often it is the place people are
leaving.”
“It is true of the suburbs, too. Look,
we are in my suburb now. This is
where I grew up, not far from Bubbi
(the singer/ songwriter known as
Iceland’s Bob Dylan). And Fridrik
Þór (the director of Angels of the
Universe and two other films Einar
Már wrote) was just a building over.
And then out on the next suburb,
the suburb of the next generation,
that’s where Björk is from.”
It is a polite rebuttal to the notion,
hinted at by Einar Már’s friend Hall-
grímur Helgason and latched onto
by the Sirkus hipster crowd, that
all life in Iceland takes place in 101
Reykjavik. The art that inspires and
connects with Einar Már is the work
of writers in especially unhip places,
in urban sprawl where, he says, “the
children have to create their own
culture.”
Rambling Danes in libraries
It is only a fifteen minute ride to the
National Library from his house, but
in that time Einar Már never stops
talking. He tells me that he spent
five years at the Danish National
Library in Copenhagen which was
so comfortable and full of outsiders
“like a bus station” which he visited
when he went back to Denmark no
longer as lonely and no longer as
broke as he once had been, where
he found the same rambling Dane
working on his dissertation on Joyce,
where he found the same American
who claimed a new best friend every
month and a new course of study
every year, it is nice to know there
are people like that at every national
library… and at every bus station.
(The mention of bus stations is
especially eerie given the conclusion
of Angels of the Universe based on
Einar Már’s brother and his last few
months at the Hlemmur bus termi-
nal before committing suicide.)
I interviewed Einar Már for two
hours in his studio: a remodeled
garage covered floor-to-ceiling with
heavily creased paperbacks in Eng-
lish, Danish, German and Icelandic,
broken only by a wall of picture win-
dows which face the house and on
which his family knocks and waves
frequently, a large black and white
photo that seems to show Einar Már
with long hair, rebelling, but that
may well be his deceased brother
Páll. He granted the interview de-
spite the fact that he is in the middle
of writing a novel and is otherwise
making few public appearances.
Small town writers
From the minute I arrive, Einar Már
starts grabbing books and tossing
them into my hand. As he talks, he
keeps as much of his thought process
as transparent as possible-- hum-
ming when he is searching for an
extremely specific point, standing
when he is explaining a broader
idea that may be of mutual interest,
crawling on the floor to see book
spines, overturning masses of seem-
ingly organized stacks of books to
show me photos of small towns in
Minnesota and small town writers.
The table in front of me has a tower
of books to explain his point, with
Ljóð, Einar Már’s hefty collection
of works since 1980 on bottom. He
digs through another stack and gives
me some translations of his poetry in
a small American literary magazine,
Visions. The poetry is strong, but the
publication is not well-known. I ask
him why such a small press, to which
he shrugs. He hadn’t even submitted.
Hallgrímur Helgason had helped
him get it published.
“The saga writers had to wait.”
While his work is translated into 20
languages, Mál og Menning is the
only press publishing any of his work
in English.This seems a significant
slight. He shrugs it off: “Good lit-
erature will always get through. The
Saga writers had to wait 500 years.”
Then he indicates his frustration
with English-language presses: “In
America they are impatient. They
have a one-book rule. They don’t
work with authors. It’s the capital-
ization of the publishing industry.”
He grimaces at capitalization - he
means this as a strong insult.
With that, Einar Már returns to his
book stacks and starts discussing
obscure writers with me: Richard
Brautigan, Sinclair Lewis, Aksel
Andemose, William Heinesen - all
these writers demonstrate his point
that great writing can come out of
the smallest places. But, I want to
say, these writers are only known by
other writers, they are barely in print.
As Einar Már discusses Faroese
writing in detail, flipping through
Heinesen’s Lost Musicians, I see any
talk of sales or fame would be entire-
ly off-topic. Einar Már would simply
like his books to be read quietly and
appreciated. It isn’t the attitude that
gets books flying off the shelves at
Barnes and Noble, but it’s an attitude
has allowed for great writing.
INTERVIEW 13