Reykjavík Grapevine - 31.07.2009, Page 46

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2009 OK. So we know the letters are a tad small here. Not many pretty pictures either. Still. These
are book reviews. If you're at all interested in reading books, then you will be familiar with the
layout. So quit your complaining. This page is of the highest value.
Books | Review Books | Review Books | Review
Brian Pilkington, a
Liverpool native liv-
ing in Iceland since
1977, is one of the
country's most be-
loved children books'
illustrators. His award-winning illustrations
have played a big role in the Icelandic trolls'
image makeover that has taken place over
the last twenty years or so. Pilkington's art
has supplied a generation of young Ice-
landers with the image of the benign and
just a little bit simple looking trolls. He has
even managed to make Grýla look nice. A
quick look into Icelandic folklore will tell
you that the trolls have not always been
as warm-hearted and chipper as Pilking-
ton's Stumble and his family, who even de-
scribe themselves as “giant-sized bundles
of fun.” In fact, the trolls of old were more
prone to forcing humans into marriage with
them (mostly the men, as there is a curious
shortage of male-trolls in our tales) and, if
that failed, the trolls had no reservations
about eating the humans. But pedagogy
doctrines have somewhat changed and it is
not fashionable to frighten the lives out of
children any more.
Stumble tells the tale of a confused troll
who wakes up one night after a very long
sleep with two ravens perched on top of
his head. He is covered in snow and can t́
remember a thing about who, or even what,
he is and how he got there. He puts his
trust in the ravens who guide him through
the harsh and wintry Icelandic landscape all
the way home, where he is reunited with his
family and gets his memory back. Pilkington
both writes and illustrates, and the text and
pictures work nicely together, though I can't
help but notice that they are the work of an
artist turned writer rather than the other
way around. The text is both simple and
straightforward. The gorgeous illustrations
are neither. Full of colour, humour, warmth
and enough detail to make you want to
turn back the pages for another look, they
are evidence enough for the reasons why
Pilkington is Iceland's most successful il-
lustrator to date. He even manages to make
a scene of Iceland's snow filled highlands
and glaciers look inviting. The trolls seem a
homely bunch and their clothes are based
on Icelandic traditional wear and obviously
inspired by Vikings, making them perhaps
look more Scandinavian then strictly Ice-
landic.
The book is obviously aimed at children
and is simple enough for those who are
able to read for themselves. It will also serve
well for reading aloud to those who are still
young to read on their own; the balance be-
tween the length of the text and picture de-
tails on each page is good enough to keep
the little ones’ attention engaged through-
out the read.
Overall it makes for a very heart-warm-
ing homecoming for Stumble and the book
serves as a nice and fun way to introduce
children to a part of Icelandic folklore. The
modern, less scary version of it, that is.
- HILDUR kNúTSDóTTIR
This is the story of
Paul. He was born in
1949, on the day that
Iceland joined the
NATO alliance. And
he believes that be-
ing welcomed into this world by protests
and tear gas must mean something. Ev-
erything in Paul’s life could appear com-
fortingly normal – his childhood in Reykja-
vík, his youth, his family and friends - if he
didn’t always jump forward to his present
reality as a schizophrenic in Kleppur, a
mental health institution in Reykjavík. And
when teenage Paul meets Dagný, who is
the initial cause of his final breakdown, the
first signs of mental disease already show.
As his illness slowly takes over his normal
life and sanity, the descriptions of a life as
an institutionalized person increasingly
overshadow the memories of his normally
appearing youth.
Paul introduces many different charac-
ters of his life to the reader, one of them
being King Baldwin, who advices Paul to
watch over the angels who are guarding
him. He also vividly describes his friends
from the mental health hospital, like Oli
Beatle, who believes that he wrote the
Beatles’ songs and Viktor, who talks and
behaves as if he was an old English noble-
man. Or Peter, who is waiting every day for
a call from the University of Beijing that will
confirm his doctorate degree.
Trying to escape from their reality in
Kleppur, these friends seize every oppor-
tunity to go out to town and forget about
their sickness, the medication and the
alienation from society. In a surprisingly
sane vision of things, they fool around
and make jokes about themselves and
other people and have a good time. This
moving novel is filled with beautiful, tragic
metaphors and images. Some of Paul’s
adventures with his fellow institutionalized
friends are even utterly comical and hilari-
ous. But it’s hard to give in to one’s laugh-
ter given the bitter and capitulating tone of
Paul’s descriptions. He is in a state of pitiful
disorder and, consequently, his memories
are always interrupted by the harsh de-
scriptions of painful and inhuman medical
treatment and imprisonment. And in the
end, when Paul is fey and disconnected
from this world, the words of King Baldwin
will echo in the reader’s mind: ‘You haven’t
looked after your angels’.
Einar Már Guðmundsson is one of Ice-
land’s most famous writers. He dedicated
this book to his deceased brother Páll and
poetically processed in it his own experi-
ences with Páll’s mental illness. He clearly
gave the world one of the most acclaimed
Nordic novels in recent times, which was
awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature
Price in 1995. In his German translation
from the same year (the one under review
now) Bernard Scudder manages to convey
metaphors and pictures beautifully.
- IRINA DOMURATH
In 1998, Minnesotan writer and teach-
er Bill Holm bought himself a house
called Brimnes in Hofsós, a small vil-
lage a half-hour's drive from the town of
Sauðárkrókur in northern Iceland. He
began to spend his summer vacations
there, playing the piano, writing, watch-
ing the mountains on the other side of
Skagafjörður, entertaining visitors and
getting to know his neighbours and his
own Icelandic roots (which were actually
in Vopnafjörður). Bill Holm died at the age
of sixty-five in February 2009, leaving this
book behind as a record of his connection
with Iceland.
The Windows of Brimnes has ten
chapters, each of which can be read as an
independent essay. The first four cover
Hofsós, Skagafjörður, Icelandic birds, and
Icelandic folktales. Then Holm shifts his
view towards America, with an essay about
Icelandic immigrants and his family his-
tory, another about his youth and young
adulthood in the shadow of the Vietnam
War, and a third about the question of how
much choice we have in deciding who and
what we listen and pay attention to. The
three concluding essays discuss Icelandic
Christianity (both in Iceland and North
America), Icelandic poetry, and finally Ice-
landic (and American) politics.
Holm summered here, so his Iceland
is a bright, magical place full of creativity
and celebration. He speaks about beauti-
ful things: horses, folktales, birdwatching,
writers, poets, musicians, and friends. He
knows that Iceland will be strange and ex-
otic to many of his readers, so he blends
in some of the beginner stuff that we're all
familiar with – how the phone book is or-
ganized by first name, how special the tölt
is, how the moon astronauts trained here,
how horsemeat is better than you think,
and how great it is that there are no mos-
quitoes in Iceland.
A focus on the fat and sweetness of a
country is typical of ethnic literature in
America. Italian-Americans write lovingly
about risotto and ribollita. Scottish-Amer-
icans shore up the shortbread-and-haggis
industry. Native readers tire of this quickly,
but must understand that this kind of talk
is what makes Diaspora members feel like
they belong and should come back for a
visit.
Holm saw untapped value in small
communities, whose neighbourliness
fascinated and comforted him. His 1996
book The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere
on Earth argues that one can lead a full
and satisfying life in Minneota, Minne-
sota (population 1500), his hometown.
Windows of Brimnes is an ode to the way
of life in Hofsós and Skagafjörður. Holm
has little appetite for Reykjavík, which, he
regrets, "is now a real city."
Just when the reader is ready to dismiss
Holm as hopelessly in the grip of what Jim
Rice has called the Iceland-is-wonderful
discourse, comes the book's last essay,
“Fog.” In it, Holm recognizes that he has
presented an image of Iceland slathered
in “whipped cream and jam.” Writing
well before the bank collapse, he proposes
that Icelandic “idealism, intelligence, and
humour” is also mixed with “venality, fool-
ishness, and greed.” He especially criticiz-
es aluminium processing and the dam at
Kárahnjúkar, which he says amount to the
deflowering of the Icelandic landscape.
Regardless of one's stance towards
smelters and dams, this is a welcome
recognition that life in Iceland is not just
a midsummer idyll. There is another Ice-
land where trout are raised in pens, not
fished from lakes and streams; few people
write, and fewer still farm; and daily life
is, like elsewhere, burdened by political
and moral uncertainty and dispute. So far,
Icelandic fiction writers such as Arnaldur
Indriðason and Hallgrímur Helgason
have explored this Iceland better than any
foreign observer.
Key to Holm's love of Iceland is that
Iceland was his refuge from the distur-
bances of the American national soul.
Holm was a freethinking Christian rather
than a fundamentalist, a truth-teller rather
than a dissembler, an observer rather than
a war-maker, and someone who ques-
tioned what he was told to believe. He felt
that in Iceland, society shared his values,
or at least, more so than in America.
Iceland is, in truth, a disputatious and
contentious land where public discourse
moves from one tense debate to the next.
A recurring theme is whether Iceland
should become more like the United States
or more like Europe – in areas as diverse as
health care finance, national defence, In-
ternet commerce, eating habits, city plan-
ning, energy privatization, and alcohol
sales. I think Holm was pretty knowledge-
able about current affairs in Iceland, and
nevertheless decided against making Win-
dows of Brimnes a book about the country
in all moods and months of the year.
Indeed, I suspect that there are a lot
of readers who will like Holm's sweeter,
creamier take, and that Windows of
Brimnes will age well. It’s already out in
paperback. I had a good time reading it,
and I can say it’s one of the better Iceland
books on the market – a concise and read-
able record of an American's attachment to
the North Atlantic. - BY IAN WATSON
Born in Minnesota in 1943, Bill Holm
taught writing at Southwest Minnesota State
University and was the author of twelve books
of poems and essays, including Eccentric Is-
lands, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on
Earth, Playing the Black Piano, and the in-
triguingly named Boxelder Bug Variations.
Holm died in February 2009.
The Word is a
Virus
Poetry | Eiríkur Norðdahl
Imagine a poem so robust
and resourceful that it
could survive humanity.
Imagine that the Ameri-
cans finally go complete-
ly bonkers and rip the globe
apart with liberational glee, the nuclear
dust finally settles and all that’s left of
mankind is poetry. The mark of crafts-
manship has always been durability. A
good cabinet has a couple of hundred
years in it. A decent car will carry you for
ten to fifteen years. The best laptops have
at least six crash-free months in ‘em. The
Eddas are as good now as they were a
thousand years ago. But a poem that’ll
outlive humanity?
Enter: The Xenotext Experiment, a
“literary exercise that explores the aes-
thetic potential of genetics in the mod-
ern milieu” in the words of its author,
multi-maniac, mad scientist and poetic
mastermind, Christian Bök (né “Book” –
The Christian Book, get it?). And Mr. Bök
has the all the God-complexes you’d ex-
pect from a savant named after the good
Book: not satisfied with simply producing
dead poetry for the page Christian Bök
has decided to make his poetry come
alive. Literally.
“I propose to encode a short verse into
a sequence of DNA in order to implant it
into a bacterium,” says the biblical scribe
/ poem-god in an essay on the matter.
The plan is that the text be composed in
such a way that, when translated into a
gene and then integrated into the cell,
the text will be “expressed” by the organ-
ism, “which, in response to this grafted,
genetic sequence, begins to manufacture
a viable, benign protein – a protein that,
according to the original, chemical alpha-
bet, is itself another text”.
The bacterium will not only store a
poem – it’s not only a living poem – it’s
also supposed to create its own poetry,
elevating Christian from mere poem-god
to poet-god: creator and programmer of
poets (what sort of poetry Christian’s fu-
ture army of bacteria-poets will write, no
one knows – perhaps they’ll make their
own bacteria. Perhaps they’ll be rhyming
neo-formalists).
Freaked out already? Until recently
chances of Christian actually doing this
were slim. Not because it was theo-
retically impossible – quite the contrary,
similar things have already been done
(the cybernetic expert Pak Wong partially
stored the lyrics to Disney’s “It’s a Small
World” as a strand of DNA inside a bac-
terium) and Christian has already proved
his capability for writing creatively within
severe constraints (each chapter of his
book, Eunoia, contains only one of the
vowels). But science doesn’t come cheap.
I don’t think anyone actually expected
Christian to ever get the money needed
– including the poet-god to-be himself.
A couple of months ago, the grants
came through. Christian Bök now only
waits for his sabbatical from the Univer-
sity of Calgary to start.
It’s officially time to start freaking out.
Angels of the Universe
Einar Már Guðmundsson
Mál og Menning, English edition first
published in 1995
Translation by Bernard Scudder, 1995
The Windows of Brimnes
Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2007
Stumble, an Icelandic Troll Story
Brian Pilkington (illustrations and text)
Mál og menning, Reykjavík 2000