Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.04.2011, Side 13

13
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 4 — 2011
of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year,
which means that international interest in
Icelandic books is probably greater than ever
before.
GROUPIES CUM
REVOLUTIONARIES
Interestingly enough, just as artists played
groupies to the “outvasion”, they also had a
grand presence in the “kitchen utensil revo-
lution”—being both numerous among pro-
testers and in the forefront of organising and
rabble-rousing. Most self-respecting artists
made sure they were seen on Austurvöllur-
square, beating pots and pans—participating
with various degrees of irony, from going “all
in” and seemingly taking a sincere interest in
an important cause, to somehow completely
missing the point and taking a break from
the tear-gas and mayhem with the masses to
attend an exclusive champagne-party with
the Baroness von Habsburg at a nearby the-
atre (which many did): celebrating the still-
standing aristocracy while cursing the fallen
aristocracy, and seemingly not experiencing
it as a contradiction.
Living abroad I only attended one of
these protests—on a quiet Sunday in early
December when it seemed the revolution-
ary fire was going out. That day a group of
younger boys climbed up on the balcony of
parliament, where it had become tradition
to hang protest banners, but this time the
hooligans were in fact not protesters but a
little-known rock band using the momentum
to advertise their MySpace-page. At another
instance I heard of an Icelandic rapper, fa-
mous for his “revolutionary stance”, having
his picture taken outside a siege at the Cen-
tral Bank—before leaving to attend to more
important business. There were a number
of similar events, where artists tried to “use”
the protests to up their public image, in a
somewhat less than sincere manner.
The media having failed, in the opinion
of most of the protesters (and the people at
large, I assume), an online webzine called
Nei. (No.—including the period), run by poet,
novelist, philosopher and filmmaker Haukur
Már Helgason (who coincidentally is my best
friend), became the hub for both immediate
(reliable) information about events as they
unfolded as well as in-depth commentary
and first-person accounts after-the-fact.
The main organiser of the protests on
Austurvöllur, starting with only a hand-
ful of people shortly after the collapse, was
old-timer Hörður Torfason—a troubadour
and gay-rights campaigner who was most
influential in the seventies and early eight-
ies. Of the 47 speeches held at Austurvöl-
lur from October 11, 2008, to January 31,
2009—22 were held by artists or people im-
mediately connected to the arts, including
writer Einar Már Guðmundsson and poet
Gerður Kristný. At one point, famed writer
Hallgrímur Helgason was seen banging his
hands on the hood of the Prime Minister’s
car “distorted with rage” claimed the me-
dia. After the “kitchen utensil revolution”
at least two of the artists involved with the
protests got elected to parliament, as mem-
bers of the newly founded Borgarahreyfing
(Citizen’s Movement—soon after, they split
and the parliamentary faction was renamed
Hreyfingin, The Movement)—poet Birgitta
Jónsdóttir and novelist and filmmaker Þráinn
Bertelsson. Besides the "bona fide" artists, a
creative spirit was plentiful on Austurvöllur
during the protests—noticeable in anything
from slogans, signs, flags, dolls, clothing and
the "instruments" themselves: anything that
made a racket was suddenly useful.
WHAT IS 'CRISIS'? WHAT IS
'BOOK'?
Defining what literature counts as “crisis-
literature” is not an easy task. To a certain
extent (practically) all literature written
during (or right after) the crisis is “crisis-
literature”—and even a great deal of the lit-
erature written during the economic boom,
before the crisis. Many books included the
crisis, the collapse and/or the protests by
simply adapting the storyline to the times. If
the story happened in 2008-2009, there was
no way of skipping it, although most of the
books that included the crisis were not about
it at all—they neither reflected it to any de-
gree nor did they comment on it. Then there
are books which don’t mention the crisis at
all, but somehow seem to allude to it con-
stantly—this of course goes mostly for poetry
books, which are more easily interpretable in
all directions, and if you look for it you can
probably find in them whatever you wish to
find. Finally there was plenty of immediate
work being published both online and on
protest-signs at the time of the crisis—small
bits, ranging from video cut-ups of speeches
to remixing classics of modernist and pre-
modernist Icelandic verse, fitting it to the
political situation. Much of this was non-
authored and none of it had a consistency
justifying a specific treatment, other than of
the whole thing as a social phenomenon—it
wasn’t necessarily many poems, but one re-
ally big poem.
Excluding the non-fiction written about
the crisis—like Einar Már Guðmundsson’s
‘The White Book’—the prose fiction that
deals with the crisis does so, in a certain
sense, peripherally. The novels are all es-
sentially about something else—they stand
right in front of the crisis and they turn their
gaze away. ‘Bankster’ by Guðmundur Ós-
karsson, winner of the Icelandic Literature
Prize 2010, is for instance first and foremost
a story about being unemployed and falling
into self-deprecation, self-pity and thus los-
ing control of one’s life. The protagonist is
an employee in a bank that comes crashing
down, and subsequently he loses his job. For
the rest of the book he lounges about in a
Raskolnikovian introversion, without the
guilt—and while lounging about his life falls
apart around him, his wife leaving him and so
forth. At the same time the massive protests
are going on, literally outside his house, but
he hardly notices—and the one time he gets
mixed up in them he flees the chaos back
into his introvert world of spiritual exile.
Kári Tulinius’ ‘Píslarvottar án hæfileika’
(“Martyrs without talents”) is about a group
of young would-be revolutionaries, pre-cri-
sis, who wish to start a terrorist cell. These
are young people, with young problems—
love, ideals etc.—trying to find a footing in
life. The first section ends in September,
2008, days before the collapse, when two
of them go as volunteers to Palestine on a
humanitarian aid mission. The second sec-
tion starts in November, when the volunteers
are back. Instead of throwing themselves
into the revolutionary spirits of Austurvöl-
lur, they (like the protagonist of ‘Bankster’)
are thrown off track by a personal tragedy:
namely the accidental (yet violent) death of
one of the main characters in Palestine.
A third novel, ‘Vormenn Íslands’ (“Ice-
land’s Men of Spring”) by Mikael Torfason,
is about a former assistant to a financial vi-
king who is reckoning his past—but instead
of dealing with the years as an assistant to
a financial viking, it jumps over it and mostly
focuses on the protagonist’s childhood. A
fourth, ‘Paradísarborgin’ (“The Paradise
City”) by Óttar Martin Norðfjörð is a Sara-
magoan account, if a tad more sci-fi-ish and
less style-orientated than the Portuguese
Nobel laureate, about a fungus growing un-
der Reykjavík which entices the minds of the
people, like a shamanic drug. It does in some
sense deal directly with the crisis but it does
so with a metaphor which is perhaps too
vague and too general in its presentation,
and too conspicuous in its (solicited) inter-
pretation—and the author did at some point
stress that it in fact wasn’t about the crisis.
‘Allir litir regnbogans’ (“All the Colours
of the Rainbow”) by Vignir Árnason is a
strangely puerile self-published novel about
an anarchist movement, which runs quickly
through the kitchen utensil revolution into
total (melodramatic) civil war between cops
and revolutionaries. An interesting account,
if rather callow, which never surpasses the
expression of its teeth-grinding angst to pro-
vide anything resembling an idea.
Thus these authors, whose novels deal
most directly with the crisis of all of the nov-
els published in Iceland since the collapse1,
avoid dealing with the actual events of Aus-
turvöllur or the crisis itself, but circle it, or
rather confront it and, having seen a glimpse
of it, take a violent turn towards the personal
and away from the general, the masses, the
overtly political.
This may of course be interpreted in a
symbolic sense, as literature’s utter defeat
before the “actualities of life”. In private cor-
respondence, poet and novelist Haukur Már
Helgason confided in me that after editing
Nei. he felt a much greater need to engage
in text that directly affected the world—and
perhaps this lack of ‘crisis’ in the ‘crisis-liter-
ature’ is mainly a symptom of another ‘crisis’,
namely the lack of agency in contemporary
literature which for too long may have been
busy picking at its own bellybutton and now
knows not what to do.
CUE THE PRE-COG
Bizarrely the novel most tenaciously asso-
ciated with the collapse was written before
1 For obvious reasons I’m leaving out my own
novel, ‘Gæska’ (“Kindness”, 2009). But suffice
to say, it also leaves off moments after the
economic collapse (which, having been written
before the actual collapse, looks quite a bit
different from real life) and resumes “a while later
this same endless summer”—meaning that it too
contains a gap where the actual “action” took
place, and does not deal directly (unsymboli-
cally) with the events of Austurvöllur or the crisis
itself. I’m leaving out at least two other novels,
simply because I’ve yet not read them, ‘Martröð
Millanna’ (“The Nightmare of the Millionaires”)
by Óskar Hrafn Þorvaldsson and ‘Önnur líf’
(“Other Lives”) by Ævar Örn Jósepsson, both
primarily crime fiction, but apparently taking
place in the business world and the rebel world,
respectively.
it happened and published shortly after the
banks fell. ‘Konur’ (“Women”) by Steinar
Bragi is symbolically foreboding—it tells of
a young woman, Eva, returning to Iceland
from living in the USA and her inhabiting a
borrowed apartment of a wealthy friend. The
apartment—showy, expensive and in bad
'nouveau riche' taste—turns out to be (al-
most) alive, an entity of it’s own, and it starts
sadistically manipulating Eva’s life, pushing
further and further until the end, when she
literally gets sucked into the walls.
One of the major noticeable symbols of
the “plentiful years” in Reykjavík was the
building of houses (in great part by Polish
workers). Entire neighbourhoods were built
without anyone to live in them; the rich tore
down their mansions to build better man-
sions; higher income apartment buildings for
the elderly were built, only to stand empty
while the contractors built a lower income
apartment building next to it, one that the el-
derly could “afford” to live in; a woman could
not have a dog in her apartment building,
because she needed a signed approval from
the inhabitants of the 20 other apartments in
the house, all of which were empty. Loans for
building were granted without fail and plots
were distributed with much ease.
It should therefore be easily under-
stood how ‘Konur’ might be construed as a
crisis-novel, where the newly-built house of
nouveau riche plenty, owned by a “financial
viking”, turns on the inhabitant, starts tor-
turing her before literally (and symbolically)
devouring her. It is in all ways a novel written
about the times pre-crisis and it successfully
demonstrates the seeds of the city’s, and the
country’s, self-destruction, through a kind of
symbolic pre-cognition.
COLLECTIVE POETRY
There’s boatloads of poetry about the cri-
sis. The immediate answer to the crisis was
poetic, with countless and nameless online
personalities sharing remixed versions of
modernist classics (with metre and rhyme)—
so you could literally sing the kitchen utensil
revolution in real time, if you wanted to. Hall-
grímur Helgason wrote a rap and performed
on TV (printed in The Reykjavík Grapevine),
several people made YouTube videos with
cartoons or cut-up news footage—making
poems from the bits and pieces surround-
ing them. Actor Hjalti Rögnvaldsson read
political poetry at the protest events on Aus-
turvöllur. During the kitchen utensil revolu-
tion the whole of Iceland somehow became
(at least for some) a poetic dimension. Even
that which wasn’t poetry, was still somehow
poetry.
In the months and seasons following
the collapse this energy seems to have dis-
sipated as it has not been extensively seen in
the poetry books published, where the po-
ets seem to have reverted back to the “con-
templative” and away from the “immediate”.
Most of the poems that deal with the crisis
do so in a rather mundane manner (though
by no means all of them) and many of the
books supposedly about the crisis seem to
be not at all about the crisis—but as if either
the author or the publisher had decided the
crisis was an easy sell. Crisis-stuff was in
vogue, so everything was “somehow” and
“symbolically” about the crisis.
SELECTED POETRY
There were two notable exceptions to this
trend. ‘Gengismunur’ (“Arbitrage”) by Jón
Örn Loðmfjörð and ‘Ljóðveldið Ísland’ (“The
Poetic Republic of Iceland”) by Sindri Freys-
son; both very ambitious projects. The for-
mer is a computerized textual mash-up of
a nine-volume, 2.000 pages report written
by a parliamentary investigative commit-
tee on the events leading up the collapse of
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is the author of three novels and five books of po-
ems. His collection of essays in English, ‘Quiet, You Booby!’, is forthcom-
ing from Nihil Interit/poEsia.
When best-selling crime novelist Arnaldur Indriðason is sold to
German readers, the book cover will generally sport a picture of
an old Icelandic farm and perhaps a horse, despite the fact that
his books are about the criminal horrors of big city living (in as
much as Reykjavík—pop. 120.000—can be considered a “big
city”); that is to say: drugs, alienation, loneliness and murder.
CONTINUES ON PAGE 24
An Icelandic opinion is thus a rarity like Big foot
or The Abominable Snowman—so rare in fact
that most people who’ve come into contact with it
aren’t entirely sure if they did at all, and think that
perhaps what they saw was just a really big cow or a
really small Danish person.