Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.06.2012, Blaðsíða 28

Mette Karlsvik has been known to comment on Grapevine's Facebook. If this
article gets discussed there, do you think it will cause an argument? An on-line
argument? What would that be like? letters@grapevine.is28
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2012
VALUR GUNNARSSON
BOOK COVER
“Like a character out of a Gunther Grass novel, a young
Björk walks around beating on a tin drum, announcing
her arrival at her parent’s respective households with
loud singing.”
Literature | Norwegian
From The US Army To Army of Me:
Becoming Björk
The US Naval Air Station in Kefla-
vík, which operated for 55 years
before closing in 2006, has cast a
long shadow over Icelandic culture.
Before the advent of Icelandic me-
dia other than state-sponsored ra-
dio, American Armed Forces Radio
and Television was the country’s
main window into the wider world
of pop culture.
If one looks at the generation of Icelan-
dic artists that grew up in the decades
after the war, the American presence is
everywhere, be it in the novels of Ein-
ars Kárason and Már Guðmundsson,
the films of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, and
the songs of Bubbi and Megas. But, it
is perhaps best captured in Einar Kára-
sons’ first trilogy, as represented in the
books’ titles: ‘Devil’s Island’ (this being
Iceland, of course), ‘The Golden Island’
(referring to the post-war boom) and
‘The Promised Land’ (a semi-ironic al-
lusion to some of the characters’ relo-
cation to America).
THE BIRTH OF TV
Two examples of the new batch are
Icelandic journalist Haukur Ingvars-
son, who published his first novel ‘Nó-
vember 1976’ last year, and Norwegian
writer Mette Karlsvik, who wrote ‘Bli
Björk’ (which could be translated as
“Become Björk”), also published last
year.
Haukur Ingvarsson, himself a pre-
senter at RÚV State Radio, focuses his
novel on television. A repressed house-
wife breaks the family TV and her son
tries to procure a new one, first hoping
to buy it with money raised by smug-
gling beer (illegal in Iceland until 1989)
out of the US Station and later by steal-
ing a set from the Americans outright.
In between, we get flashes of the
history of the groove tube in Iceland,
from the Armed Forces Broadcasts in
the ‘50s to the beginning of Icelandic
television itself in 1966, and the glori-
ous advent of colour TV in the year of
the title. The book begins rather sym-
bolically with TV sets going off in every
window of an apartment building at the
moment the evening news begins, and
ends with the radio waves leaving Earth
and heading into the universe.
THE ROMEO AND JULIET OF
KEFLAVÍK
Mette Karlsvik’s book is a work of fic-
tion based on the life of singer Björk
Guðmundsdóttir. Karlsvik also works
as a journalist for the Norwegian daily
“Dagsavisen,” and the novel is as thor-
oughly researched as it is poetically
phrased. As all good Icelandic sagas
do, it begins with the ancestors of the
titular character, her grandfather Gun-
nar and her mother Heiða, but most of
all her father, Guðmundur.
Guðmundur (from whom Björk’s
surname is derived) is born in 1945,
the year World War II ends and the year
after Iceland declares independence.
Guðmundur and Heiða are an Icelandic
Romeo and Juliet of sorts; love draws
them together, but the Naval Station
pulls them apart. He is an aspiring elec-
trician who works on the Station along-
side his father, and she an aspiring hip-
pie who proudly wears her “Iceland out
of NATO” badges and participates in
protests against the damming of a river
in the countryside.
A BJÖRK IS BORN
Björk is born a year before Icelandic
television begins broadcasting. Like a
character out of a Gunther Grass novel,
a young Björk walks around beating
on a tin drum, announcing her arrival
at her parent’s respective households
with loud singing. She wears American
rubber boots and listens to Julie An-
drews while turning her immediate sur-
roundings into a wellspring of sounds,
tapping on hot water tanks or kitchen-
ware, claiming this to be music. Her fa-
ther disagrees, however, and gives her
a Beatles record instead.
We look on as the child slowly dis-
covers the larger world through televi-
sion, wondering whether the Americans
and the Russians will start fighting in
space and learning to tell the difference
between images of Sæmi Rokk, a swing
dance champion and Bobby Fischer’s
bodyguard, and Boris Spassky, the
defeated Soviet champion, during the
world chess championship in 1972
ALCOHOL AND TV
Much like Mette, the older Einar and
the younger Haukur purport to tell Ice-
land’s post-war history through a fam-
ily saga, and, to paraphrase Tolstoy: All
unhappy families are unhappy in their
own particular way.
Einar’s trilogy focuses on the dis-
location as well as the opportunities
available in the post-war years. The
poor of Reykjavík moved into aban-
doned military barracks, which were
then littered around the city, and many
women left the country with Ameri-
can soldiers, sending back-stories and
presents from the land of wonder. Still
others fail to find their place in this
brave new world and become cheaters,
drunkards and thieves.
The situation in Haukur’s ‘Novem-
ber 1976’ is less colourful in its ups
and downs; it’s more quietly desper-
ate. Small wonder then that everything
centres on the colour emanating from
television, and that this would be the
perspective of someone writing many
decades later. The US military may
have left and we no longer need to
break into the Station to get beer, but it
is precisely the American influence on
culture rather than the cityscape that is
most enduring. The barracks in down-
town Reykjavík are long gone, but we
still have television.
VIOLENTLY HAppY
It is only from the Norwegian perspec-
tive that the people in post-war Iceland,
at least some of them, find their own
way. Björk grew up with her father’s
American influences and her mother’s
opposition to them and her search for
refuge in Iceland’s nature instead. It
was the offspring of this combination
that became the first Icelandic artist
to truly conquer the English speaking
world.
Where Einar’s characters succumb
to drunkenness and Haukur’s to bore-
dom, Mette’s eventually sit perched on
top of the world with Iceland proving to
be more of a golden island than a de-
mon one in this case.
Situated in the Central Bank´s main building in Kalkofnsvegur 1, Reykjavík.
Open Mon.-Fri. 13:30-15:30. Free admittance.
Numismatic Museum
The Central Bank and National Museum of Iceland jointly operate
a numismatic collection that consists of Icelandic notes and coins,
foreign money from earlier times, especially if mentioned in Icelan-
dic sources, and more recent currency from Iceland’s main trading
partner countries. A selection from the numismatic collection is on
display in showcases on the ground floor of the Central Bank’s main
building.