Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.01.2008, Qupperneq 37

Review | Reykjavík Grapevine | Issue 01 2008 | 21
Recent Books About Iceland
Cultures of the World: Iceland
By Jonathan Wilcox and Zawiah Abdul Latif
(Marshall Cavendish, 2007)
Originally published in 1996, this hardcover picto-
rial reference book was substantially updated and
reissued in 2007. At first, it appealed to me because
of its low price (US$27.95 from Amazon), its combi-
nation of thorough text and candid photos, and its
focus on everyday life in Iceland. Although part of
a series pitched to school libraries and teenagers,
the language in the book is advanced, and adults
wouldn’t feel strange receiving it as a gift. The first
author teaches Old English at the University of
Iowa. The second author appears to work for the
publisher, and has also written titles on Lebanon,
Lithuania, and Sudan. It is always fascinating to see
what image of Iceland gets presented to the world
in such books.
Unfortunately, this book is uneven. It has
good parts, but does not fully live up to its promise.
Though some photos are new, many are noticeably
out of date. The book makes plenty of accurate
observations about Icelandic society, but there
are also a lot of bloopers. So, for example, we are
told that all of Iceland’s vegetable production is
in greenhouses, that “it is unusual to find a dark-
haired Icelander,” that “whaling traditionally occu-
pied a significant part of Iceland’s economy,” that
orcas are more commonly sighted around Iceland
than minke whales, and that all Icelanders “use the
same form of address in both formal and informal
circumstances.” Other statements are years out of
date, such as that Icelandic kids start learning Dan-
ish two years before they learn English, that “any
foreigner who adopts Icelandic citizenship also has
to adopt a suitable patronymic,” and that Iceland
has five universities, all of which are state-funded
and tuition-free.
And I do think there could have been fewer
spelling errors: we find “Jökulsarion,” “Reykjahlio,”
and the hypercorrect “Vestmannæyjar,” as well as
multiple transcriptions for Þ and Ð, which is no lon-
ger acceptable in the Unicode age. In fairness, it is
hard for a single author to write such a reference
book without making mistakes, but it is usually
possible to catch most of them with good editing
and proofreading. It would also have been appro-
priate if the blond girl on the inside cover photo
had posed with an Icelandic sheepdog rather than
a Blenheim spaniel. There are worse books to give
as souvenir gifts to people who have visited you in
Iceland. But even for the price, it would have been
nice to see a little more work put into this one.
The Iceland Connection
By D. Edward Bradley
(Tarbutton Press, 2006)
I found this novel at Eymundsson. The National
Library also has a copy, or it can be ordered from
Amazon or from the publisher. It is the third vol-
ume of a trilogy, which follows a young British stu-
dent from his entry to boarding school in the first
years of World War II through young adulthood in
the 1950s. This volume is principally about his girl
troubles, which intensify after a university-spon-
sored field “expedition” to Iceland. Most of the
novel’s action takes place in Britain and Canada.
The author is a British-Canadian physicist who
turned to novel writing after his retirement from
academia. He is a contemporary of the main char-
acter and there are autobiographical threads in
the novel.
The novel has a soap-opera quality to it,
with a succession of textbook romances and be-
trayals. The writing is a bit wooden, and there
are some slightly forced plot turns (one charac-
ter is introduced when his plane crash-lands in
the North Atlantic right next to the transatlantic
ocean liner carrying two of the other characters).
A mystery that drives the plot through the first six
chapters is simply dropped and left unresolved.
While I can understand why no mainstream pub-
lisher published this book, what made it readable
for me was the author’s evident sincerity, and also
his success in creating a certain amount of genu-
ine suspense. I’d say it’s suitable for light vacation
reading. The climactic event in the story takes
place in northern Iceland, more specifically just
outside of Dalvík, but the novel has somewhat less
to do with Iceland than the title suggests.
Memoirs of an Icelandic Bookworm
By Jóna E. Hammer
(Xlibris, 2006)
Born in Akureyri in 1943, Jóna Hammer went to
college in Massachusetts and has spent her adult
life teaching university students in the United
States. Her book, which I found on sale at Ey-
mundsson, has an unusual format: sections of
memoir alternate with Icelandic folktales that she
has translated into English. The memoirs describe
her childhood in Akureyri: family, school, acting,
reading, friendships, and summers on a farm. The
folktales are very nicely selected, well translated,
and helpfully introduced.
From the first page, Hammer is an amusing,
cheery, and irreverent companion. For example,
I liked her story of how she had to read Halldór
Laxness on the sly, as his books were forbidden
as dangerously radical in her childhood home. I
enjoy memoirs, so I’d be pleased to see Hammer
expand and rewrite the recollections in this book.
I’d gladly hear more detail about her mother, her
friend Ranka, and her summers at Sandvík, and
I’d like to learn about her British father and her
adjustment to life in America. An expanded ver-
sion could benefit from a little more active editing.
Shorter sentences and fewer parentheses, semico-
lons and asides wouldn’t have to disturb the exu-
berance of the writing.
Hammer published this book through
Xlibris, one of several new American self-publish-
ing services which allow writers to get their work
out to readers without a huge initial investment.
The first such book I read was Douglas Wells’ su-
per memoir of jump-starting the tourist industry
on the Estonian islands in the early 1990s, and
since then I have really been impressed at the
amount of creativity that this new publish-on-de-
mand business model has unleashed. Jóna Ham-
mer perhaps thought of her book rather casually,
as amusement for her friends and daughter. But
she has created something that many others can
enjoy. I hope she finds time to write more in the
future.
Text by Ian Watson
Seven Books Mysteriously Missing from the
Icelandic Library System
I often hear of books that I want to look at because
they are relevant to issues in Iceland today. Usu-
ally, a book like this is too expensive to buy just
to read once or skim. Here is a short list of such ti-
tles. All deal with important issues where Iceland
could surely benefit from outside perspectives.
– The high cost of free parking, by Donald C.
Shoup (2005). Parking in Reykjavík has become
harder and harder. It looks like this author has
thought hard about the economic incentives in-
volved.
– Supermarket wars: the future of global food
retailing, by Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall
(2005). Supermarkets are so important to Icelan-
dic life and politics that I’ve been thinking I’d like
to learn more about the whole industry.
– Urban multi-culture in Norway: identity
formation among immigrant youth, by Mette
Andersson (2005). I chose this title more or less at
random from among the many books on the im-
migrant experience in mainland Scandinavia that
aren’t available here.
– Rebuilding inner city airports, by Prianka
N. Seneviratne (1996). Reykjavík is not alone in
struggling with the question of what to do with
a downtown airport built at a time when the city
was much smaller.
– A place in the sun: Shetland and oil, by
Jonathan Wills (1991). With Iceland planning to
explore for oil in the seas to the northeast of the
island, it would be good to listen to a balance of
voices about oil’s effect on our almost-next-door
neighbour, Shetland.
– Estonia: independence and European in-
tegration, by David Smith (2002). Estonia, an-
other peripheral Nordic country with an economy
vaguely similar in size to Iceland’s, pegged its cur-
rency to the Euro some years before formally join-
ing the European Union. I’m not saying we should
necessarily do this too, but I’d like to know more
about why it worked (or didn’t work) for the Es-
tonians.
– A farewell to Greenland’s wildlife, by Kjeld
Hansen (2002). This book shows how our neigh-
bours, the Greenlanders, are caught in their very
own, and somewhat different, marine harvesting
debates.