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ROAD TRIP ESSENTIALS
Have the tome of your life.
Summertime
Reads
Words THE GRAPEVINE BOOK BUREAU
Photo ART BICNICK
If you’re hitting the Ring Road
for a blissful summertime road
trip around Iceland, you’re gonna
to need a good book to take with
you. Here are five very different
but equally wonderful Icelandic
books, all of which have some-
thing to say about Iceland, wheth-
er of its past, present or future.
You’ll find them in most book-
stores, and all five are available in
English translation.
LoveStar
Andri Snær Magnason
Despite some fantastical pas-
sages in the Sagas, Icelanders
traditionally liked their beer to
be lager and their literature to be
realist. Following his acclaimed
children’s sci-fi book ‘The Story
of the Blue Planet’, Andri sub-
mitted an Icelandic rarity—a
science fiction book for adults. A
takedown of the boom years be-
fore they even happened, ‘Love-
Star’ was prescient in many
ways. It presented a very Icelan-
dic Orwellian future, in which
the country is driven to cha-
os (and manages to wreck the
world) via boundless optimism,
and free market economics. It
remains a good read, though by
now it’s more science than fic-
tion. Space burials and all. VSG
Land of Love and Ruins
Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir
“I've got to create a home of my
own. Probably alone.” With this
in mind, the narrator of this
epistolary novel begins a jour-
ney that leads her across Iceland
and Europe in search of a bal-
ance of privacy and intimacy.
Taking the form of a diary, this
book exists on the Venn dia-
gram overlap of autobiography
and fiction—what follows is an
ecological exploration of lan-
guage, place, and love, passed
on with a rakish sense of style
and fun. BH
The Blue Fox
Sjón
‘The Blue Fox’ is a short piece of
magical-realist fiction, based
on some mysterious goings-on
in rural 19th century Iceland. An
intriguing tangle of relation-
ships is shaken loose through-
out its pages, contrasted all the
time with the metaphysical re-
lationship between a hunter and
his prey—the elusive blue fox.
The third Icelandic winner of
the Nordic Literature Prize, this
is a short but gripping gem. JR
Gunnlöth’s Tale
Svava Jakobsdóttir
‘Gunnlöth’s Tale’ is probably
the best-known work of one of
Iceland’s foremost 20th centu-
ry authors and feminist pol-
iticians, Svava Jakobsdóttir.
This mysterious novel entan-
gles readers in the story of a
teenage girl who gets arrested
for allegedly committing the
strange and inexplicable crime
of stealing an ancient beaker
from a museum, claiming to
have been summoned into the
mythological world of the Norse
gods by the giantess Gunnlöth.
The narrative shifts and merges
throughout the novel, blurring
the line between reality and
myth, and offering a different
perspective on familiar tales. SL
Independent People
Halldór Laxness
‘Independent People’ is perhaps
Iceland’s most famous work of
literature since the sagas, and
is often quoted as the book that
best represents the roots of the
country’s national character.
It’s an epic novel that tells the
grim but fascinating tale of Bja-
rtur Summerhouses, a fiercely
independent farmer who strug-
gles with the life-threatening
weather, his equally indepen-
dent livestock, his family life,
and his own nature. Halldór’s
portrayal of the unrelenting
poverty and hardship of the ear-
ly 20th century is gruelling and
compelling in equal measure,
and won him the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1955. JR