Joyceans, Pynchonians, and David-Foster-Wallacians (yes, I just made that word) should be especially drawn to Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. But to aid those who are unfamiliar with the novel’s author, background, and allusions (i.e. the 99.9 % of the world’s population not from Iceland), Three Percent will be rolling out a lot of secondary material in the months to come: essays, interviews, and podcasts to help orient the brave reader who decides to take the plunge. (As previously mentioned, this title will be the focus of the second season of the Subscribe now so that you don’t miss a single episode of this entertaining deep read of this incredibly funny book.)

For the next couple months, we’ll be selling copies of the book for 20% off via Just enter the code 2MONTH at checkout.

To whet your appetite, here is the (rather unusual) press release Lytton and I came up with to promote the book to reviewers and booksellers. It gives a good idea of why this book is so rewarding, even if it is so hard to pin down.

For Immediate Release: Tómas Jónsson—Bestseller

Translated from the Icelandic, Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson is a pulp commercial novel about a stalwart hero defying his times.

No, that’s not right. A compendious, genre-twisting modernist novel, it keeps retelling itself, correcting itself.

Second Attempt: Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller?

We need a clickbait gallery of the books that are the Ulysses of their particular country. Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante is the Cuban Ulysses for its inventive, manic wordplay. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass could be the German Ulysses for its historical importance and length.

The representative from Iceland would have to be Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. Flip your copy open to any page and you’ll realize immediately that you’re encountering a novel that, like Ulysses, rewrote the rules of what a novel can do. Lists, false starts, sections without punctuation, italicized stories within digressions, flashes of concrete poetry—all within the mindscape of Tómas Jónsson, a man bed-bound (or not), his mind wandering and failing him (maybe).

No one wrote like this in Iceland in 1966 when Tómas Jónsson’s polemic hit the scene. Halldór Laxness had won the Nobel Prize a decade earlier, and Tómas took swings at his historical, realistic novels with their noble rural characters and dramatic plots. International bestsellers, they were seen as the most sophisticated and praise-worthy representation of Icelandic art and the spirit of Icelanders.

Bergsson didn’t just veer away from that mold: he shattered it, calling into question and undermining the core values of Icelandic nationalism. An iconoclast of the artistic order, many writers in Iceland today think Bergsson—born in 1932, the author of over twenty-one books, including novels, poetry collections, and works of children’s literature—is the Icelandic author who really deserved the Nobel Prize.

Which is why everyone in Iceland owns a copy of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. Although not that many of them have actually finished it.

Third Draft: Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

No. Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is less like Ulysses, and more like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—which Bergsson translated into Icelandic.

As with Marquez, reality is stretched past its limit in Bestseller: the idiom “eaten out of house and home” takes physical shape as characters find their apartments shrink in size with every bite of every meal they take.

Considered to be Bergsson’s masterpiece, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is, at its most basic level, a novel about a retired bank clerk who, senile and enraged at contemporary culture, decides to write his memoirs, ambitious to pen a bestseller like celebrity CEOs do, using his book to rage against the dumbing down of Iceland, against what he sees as moral dissolution, how the number one value in modern life is how “driven” or “enterprising” you are, and so on and so forth for notebook after notebook, filled with starts and stops and revisions and rants and so much more.

Fourth Press Release: Sjón on Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

Sjón, one of Iceland’s most famous writers, was recently asked which contemporary Icelandic authors were current inspirations to his work. He had this to say:

The grand old man of Icelandic literature is Guðbergur Bergsson and I keep being influenced by his modernist novels from the 60s as well as some of his later works. Luckily for English readers his early masterpiece Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller will be published by Open Letter in the U.S. next year. It is the greatest attack ever launched against the overblown ideas behind the official image of the Icelandic national character. It is a picaresque, Rabelaisian, joyful experiment where the main character even assigns a passport to his penis: Occupation: Toy. Height: 18 cm. Eye color: Red. Etc. Like all works that are watershed events his best novels have made writing both easier and more difficult for those of us who followed in his wake.

This is good blurb material, even if some readers don’t like penis jokes and others aren’t familiar with Rabelais. But the world needs attacks against overblown, nationalistic ideas. It’s both good and scary how timely this novel is.

The Fifth Release: Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

Better yet: the comparison should be William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, what with the old man rants and textual games. This is not an easy novel to understand—a statement Tómas Jónsson embraces right from its start. Is art supposed to be something we understand? Should it reflect the values and trends of the moment, regurgitating what the occasional book reader—who has never read Ulysses and owns an un-opened Book Club edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude—would like so as to reaffirm their preexisting ideas?

These are some of the questions that will be addressed in the weekly Two Month Review podcast (and series of posts on Three Percent) for Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller taking place over August and September. Co-hosted by Open Letter’s Chad W. Post and poet-translator Lytton Smith (who has referred to this as the most difficult and important translation he’s ever done), the podcast will provide a deep dive into Bergsson’s novel chunk by chunk, recapping and appreciating the book while exploring its more Joycean-Marquezian-Gassian bits, providing a wider historical and literary context. All of these podcasts will be available on the Three Percent website, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Be sure and take advantage of the (enter 2MONTH at checkout), subscribe to the podcast, and join in the discussion about Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller over at And stay tuned over the next week for a number of other posts about this incredible novel.

Here’s a bit from

The grand old man of Icelandic literature is Guðbergur Bergsson and I keep being influenced by his modernist novels from the 60s as well as some of his later works. Luckily for English readers his early masterpiece Tomas Jonsson – Bestseller will be published by Open Letter in the U.S. next year. It is the greatest attack ever launched against the overblown ideas behind the official image of the Icelandic national character. It is a picaresque, Rabelesian, joyful experiment where the main character even assigns a passport to his penis: Occupation: Toy. Height: 18 cm. Eye color: Red. Etc. Like all works that are watershed events his best novels have made writing both easier and more difficult for those of us who followed in his wake.

And here’s a general description:

A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, Tómas Jónsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he’s going to write his own—a sure bestseller—that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, Tómas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir—something that’s as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published.

Considered by many to be the “Icelandic Ulysses” for its wordplay, neologisms, structural upheaval, and reinvention of what’s possible in Icelandic writing, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller was a bestseller, heralding a new age of Icelandic literature.

Enter to win below, or read a

Jón Gnarr is an actor, punk rocker, comedian, and author who created the satirical “Best Party” in Iceland and, against all odds, rose to become major of Reykjavík. He is one of the world’s most colorful politicians, and this is your chance to meet the man who has both enthralled and often flummoxed the media with his achievements and outlandish attitude. This new book explores the obstacles Jón overcame during a time in his life when he was originally diagnosed with “mental retardation” due to dyslexia, learning difficulties, and ADHD.

We have the pleasure of hosting a event with Jón and Lytton at 6 p.m. tonight, at the College Town Barnes & Noble. The event is free and open to the public, and is going to be AMAZING!

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

The opening of Jón Gnarr’s novel/memoir The Indian is a playful bit of extravagant ego, telling the traditional story of creation, where the “Let there be light!” moment is also the moment of his birth on January 2nd, 1967. Then comes sly awareness of the flow from preconsciousness to consciousness, “Murmuring becomes speech and words. Everything gradually clarifies, taking on a fantastic light. You get on intimate terms with your existence.” It is his life story, so why not make God’s creation of the universe culminate with him? This stylistic turn is Gnarr’s immediate signal to reiterate his author’s note: this is both a memoir and a novel. It will tell a truthful story of his life, but the only way to do that, with faulty memories, with absence of memories, is through literature.

As readers, we should interpret it as we do fiction: creatively, poetically, without leaving behind the emotions and the struggles, even the lessons learned, that biography offers. The Indian has everything that people want from mainstream literature: emotions, plot, likeable characters, lessons learned, personal growth, yet it is so much better—the emotions and characters more complex, the writing skillful. This is the type of book that readers deserve, both those who read widely and those who read four or five “popular” books a year.
After the opening, Gnarr leaves that ego aside for a couple chapters to tell us about his family, his parents, his significantly older siblings, his grandparents. He summarizes their lives, tells how they came to live in a suburb of Reykjavík. The Indian will be his life, his story, and he lives it in a private, isolated world, but Gnarr cares for the lives around him.

For the rest of the review, go here.

As readers, we should interpret it as we do fiction: creatively, poetically, without leaving behind the emotions and the struggles, even the lessons learned, that biography offers. The Indian has everything that people want from mainstream literature: emotions, plot, likeable characters, lessons learned, personal growth, yet it is so much better—the emotions and characters more complex, the writing skillful. This is the type of book that readers deserve, both those who read widely and those who read four or five “popular” books a year.
After the opening, Gnarr leaves that ego aside for a couple chapters to tell us about his family, his parents, his significantly older siblings, his grandparents. He summarizes their lives, tells how they came to live in a suburb of Reykjavík. The Indian will be his life, his story, and he lives it in a private, isolated world, but Gnarr cares for the lives around him.

Gnarr is famous as the comedian who became the mayor of Reykjavík after running a campaign mocking politics, and bringing liberalism and entertainment to his politics. The Indian has nothing to do with his adult life, but the entertainment and compassion is easily identifiable with his future. Instead, The Indian is the story of his young childhood, his struggle with then-undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia—the reports from the psychiatric ward that break up the narrative show doctors didn’t know what to make of the boy. So, yes, it is a biography of a difficult childhood, of distress, of being sent away from home, of family hardship, but Gnarr handles this differently, and for the best, than many memoirs that fall into these categories. There are no horrors that sell as spectacle.

Gnarr’s finest accomplishment in this book, surpassing others in the genre, is the absolute immediacy of the childhood experience. The first person narration is immersed in childhood, in the reasoning, the emotions, the desperate way that every moment of childhood is overwhelming, and is all that exists. Part of his path to this is the perspective of the narration. There are brief scenes where Gnarr has knowledge of events or changes in his life to come, but most of the time that is avoided. Instead, the first-person is ever the child’s view, reacting entirely as a child would, not judged or even reflected on by a man looking back on his life. But, thankfully, almost heroically, this doesn’t come remotely close to that overwhelmingly popular trope of the precocious, hyper-intelligent child narrator that authors adapt to excuse themselves from writing anything like actual childish thoughts. The narrator is adult and child simultaneously. It’s a style that leads to both beauty and deeply affecting motions. As much as it asks you to relate to young Jón, it becomes impossible to escape your own childhood experiences.

Jón is endearing when he patiently explains the rules of games, “It’s different in shoot and run or cops and robbers. Then if you shoot someone he’s dead. Though some kids never admit they’re dead.” His plain logic is both his way of processing his experiences and sharing them. The conclusions of his reasoning are present in both joys and sorrows. When he breaks his arm riding a bike, it was because he “had just gotten a speedometer and I was trying to set a speed record.” There’s nothing else there. We know the absurdity of the A to B movement, but by leaving it out, child logic is triumphant. It’s impossible not to love that way of thinking, just a little.

When in sorrow, the directness of his expression leads not to pits of suffering that beg for a response closer to pity than empathy, but to closeness as we move in step with his thoughts. The Indian is so much about the great sorrows that are specific to childhood, to those vulnerabilities that, even if you experience them later in life, are always childish in their timidness, in their inward turning. Jón admits “When I was a kid I would sometimes hide from teachers. I liked doing that a lot but I’ve grown out of it now. I’m not as naughty as I used to be. I also don’t feel as bad as I felt back then.” He states facts and feelings, and we read the links he can’t articulate, that shame or the attempt to assimilate into adulthood keep him from comprehending. His feeling bad is something no one in his life addresses, they only see the “naughtiness” that results from it, so he learns that feeling bad is itself a form of naughtiness. It’s heartbreaking, the more so if you remember such experiences yourself. When he condemns himself for being evil, disgusting, hating himself and everyone, I cried and left the book aside for a day or two, not wanting to remember when I thought those same thoughts.

The realism, in emotion and thought, of this life of a child became the most challenging part of reading The Indian for me. Memoirs of abusive childhoods, of trauma and extreme circumstances far beyond my own experiences, beyond many people’s are the most popular. There, the reader’s reach of empathy and connection is a personal accomplishment, a prideful stretch that is always a step away from their own pains. Gnarr’s memoir has the hook with his specific personal struggle of ADHD and dyslexia, but his isolation is utterly familiar. His expression of that, his understanding of the utterly crushing presence of it, the belief, in the end false, that it is inescapable, would have been life-changing, momentous, to read as a child myself.

He is alone when he cries out in his head “I want to go home and into my bedroom. I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to be here. I want to go far inside myself, further, further, deep down where no one can bother me and no one is mad at me.” He wants nothing more than safety and escape, and there is no one who can offer either, who can even understand him wanting these things in the way he does. In other words, there’s no one to talk to, to help identify and process his feelings. It’s a deep, permeating loneliness. The Indian becomes that person to talk to for people who have or have had this in common with Gnarr. It’s a book that triumphs in making us less alone in this world.

As in that intro, Jón’s perspective, his ego, dominates. He constantly turns inward, as a child hurt by the world does. But he does not want to only turn inward. Those notes from the psychiatrist are not just about Jón but about his parents too. They document the struggle of raising a child like him: he is not the only one wounded, and sharing the notes stretch compassion to his parents. This turns to one of the most poignant aspects of the book: the unbearable shame of a child who hurts his parents, but cannot move past the ways those people hurt him. At one point, Jón recognizes that he has hurt his father, sees “His eyes are full of sadness,” but it’s impossible for him to grasp how it happened. Jón feels his father has no interest in anything he says or wants to share, so he does nothing. When father thinks son will open up, but instead only asks for money because he’s afraid, protecting himself, he is pained by this distance from his son. Jón sees his father’s hurt, and it hurts him too, but he can’t see a way past it.

Gnarr’s recreation of childhood is not just of struggle. He brings out the special form of love children can have for their mothers, noticing things: “Mom smiles. She smiles beautifully.” There is plenty of humor, both in the absurd heights of trouble Gnarr finds himself in and in the moments of lightness with his family. He picks out the explosions of children’s imaginations, the way that a few items—a headdress and a knife—lead to a whole new identity, that of Indian. He expresses that innocent fury, the desire for destruction that the child sees no harm in, just play, experimentation, expression. There pains we are all familiar with, but which adults simply brush off when children encounter them, telling them, “That’s life.” It seems wildly immature to be anguished that rules like going to school must be followed, but that is only in the context of adulthood. Gnarr returns those emotions—all the emotions of childhood—to their context, adding the suffering of learning them, finding new restrictions, fearing ones you don’t know, and we relate to them once again. This is the gift of The Indian, the way that it makes the child, our child-self, alive, close to heart and mind, in all his pain and his happiness. The Indian is brave in this gift, and dares me to be brave too, enough to find the child of my past and make him present.

Patrick is one of our regular reviewers, fellow literature enthusiast, and a patient person to boot (I’ve had this review in-hand since before Christmas—sorry!). He also hopes, one day, to own a drunken dog named Wigrum. Or at least I hope he does; it’s an idea so great that I would feel horrible stealing it. (And before any readers go all PETA on me, just give a hyper pitbull-rottweiler mix a quarter cup of beer and watch it pass out happily, snoring, in the middle of the living room for an hour, and then judge me. Your grandpa/uncle/dad never comes near to looking that happy.)

I DIGRESS. Per usual. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

Short story collections, whether collected over a period of time or written specifically as a set, often have a way of revealing an author’s preoccupation, and Ólafur Gunnarsson’s The Thaw is no different. Throughout its ten stories, we see the same themes turned to time and time again: ambiguity overlaying points of clarity, a blend of mundane realism and the weird, compassion coming from moments of insights into a character, and the sinister potential that broils beneath when all of this interacts. Reading his returns to themes one after another makes it easy to see when it succeeds, and when it falls flat.

The opening two stories do much to show what to expect. In the brief “Alien,” a father’s response to one of his young daughters enjoying Ridley Scott’s Alien is to tell her that he too is an alien, and will return home that day. In the divorced, broken family (in the time of the story, even the twins are separated), the unnamed characters, simply daughters, wives, and narrators, we see the isolation of people from one another that will run through the rest of the stories. There is the haunting, unresolved, near cruelness of his treatment of his daughter, but it is heavy-handed, and reads like the idea of an author, not the character himself. We also encounter a certain oddness with Gunnarsson’s writing: he wants ambiguity to have the final word, but there is also an affection for brief statements of certainty. When it shows us what we otherwise might not see, it is welcome, but when, as in this opening story, he explains the plot of Alien, or in “The Revelation” portrays an alcoholic nearly bathing in Southern Comfort, and later points out it is his favorite drink, ambiguity would be preferable. It is, in the end, a rough and unenthusiastic way to begin a collection.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The opening two stories do much to show what to expect. In the brief “Alien,” a father’s response to one of his young daughters enjoying Ridley Scott’s Alien is to tell her that he too is an alien, and will return home that day. In the divorced, broken family (in the time of the story, even the twins are separated), the unnamed characters, simply daughters, wives, and narrators, we see the isolation of people from one another that will run through the rest of the stories. There is the haunting, unresolved, near cruelness of his treatment of his daughter, but it is heavy-handed, and reads like the idea of an author, not the character himself. We also encounter a certain oddness with Gunnarsson’s writing: he wants ambiguity to have the final word, but there is also an affection for brief statements of certainty. When it shows us what we otherwise might not see, it is welcome, but when, as in this opening story, he explains the plot of Alien, or in “The Revelation” portrays an alcoholic nearly bathing in Southern Comfort, and later points out it is his favorite drink, ambiguity would be preferable. It is, in the end, a rough and unenthusiastic way to begin a collection.

Fortunately, it is a collection. The title story is perhaps the best of them. Two brothers, in their forties and fifties, are still entwined, living and working together, with the older, though “a balding and scrawny man . . . who suffered from rheumatism” dominating over the younger. Digging a drainage ditch, they find a skull, and their reaction is so casual, enthusiastic for possible Viking treasure, we can miss the sinister nature of the discovery, and the way it threatens the rest of the story.

Where the threat, and sense of surreal prophecy, is palpable is in the way the brothers each remember the same story. The younger brother, Jonas, the dominated one, the sympathetic one, recounts it in memory first, the drowning of a horse and a man in an attempt to win a bet by riding across a lake. When the older brother, Ragnar, remembers it, we see the effect of their closeness: they are intimate enough to remember the same thing apart from each other. We also see the violence lurking in this: Jonas has no patience for hearing it again, but cannot stand up for himself. Ragnar reveals what the younger did not remember, that the bet was over a woman. When a woman enters the picture and falls in love with Jonas, dread settles in, grows as she moves in with her young son, and breeds violence in the household, which culminates in a fulfillment of the shared memory.

Gunnarsson’s collection shows his interest not just in building different types of tension between people, but in looking at how it arises, what causes it. Throughout, and reflective of the smallness of Iceland, intimacy is often forced and inescapable, and therefore a tension. In “The Thaw,” Jonas cares for his new girlfriend’s young son, and has no problem having sex with her when the son is in the next room, but the thought of doing so where his brother can hear is unbearable. In the former, the intimacy is chosen, in the latter, it is forced. “The Beauty Contest” shows an Icelandic singer who nearly made it big in Europe let his insecurities send him into a single battle on stage with Rod Stewart. In “Gimme Shelter” neighbors passively fight each other over a cat.

The story follows Jim, and his continually absent cat. He finds that the old man across the hall is taking the cat in, watching television, feeding it meals the man once fed his wife. It becomes a fight between them, with neither backing down, nor crossing a line. Adding to the conflict is Jim’s fear that the old man knows the woman living with him is a stripper, and this fear, combined with his lack of empathy, suggests he is capable of greater cruelty than denying a lonely old man comfort. The old man himself hints at knowing more than he lets on, and behind his submissiveness, there is an insistence guised behind politeness. By the end, when all is brought to light, there is not relief, but a dark turn. Like the unearthing of the skull, when what was buried is brought to the surface, it is not so to breathe clear air.

None of this is to say that these stories are obsessively dark. The final story, “Gaga,” is the strange tale of a man who believes that he has awoken on a Mars that is mimicking Reykjavik and that everyone he meets is a Martian imposter. Most of the stories have some strangeness running through them, as in one of the strongest stories, “The Killer Whale,” where a dying daughter could have any terminal disease to serve the plot but has a rare one, causing her to prematurely age. In “Gaga” it is dominant. Though there is some excitement in seeing this come to full fruition, it doesn’t ultimately build into an interesting whole. The stories are also not so self-serious that they are entirely devoid of humor, but more indifferent. When humor cracks through in “The Man Who Wanted to Be Vincent,” a story of a failed painter, it is a welcome variety in tone. This tonal shift allows Gunnarsson to pull off the interesting trick of seeing an artist be liberated from his bitterness by an insult.

Overall, The Thaw is a mixed collection. Though connected through themes, preoccupations, and habits, the plots and characters are not repetitious, and in offering different characters, Gunnarsson offers and finds different routes for their insecurities and motivations. It is also mixed in quality, both beginning and ending on the weakest stories in the bunch. The middle has stories of fullness and complexity, and while in the others, it is possible to poke at weak moments where Gunnarsson doesn’t seem to quite trust the reader or himself (it is easy to wonder if his role as his own translator plays into this), it is more rewarding to devote attention to all that does work in them.

The first time I saw The Whispering Muse was in a bookstore in Riga, Latvia, misplaced somewhere on the D-F shelf. Taking this as a sign of meant-to-be, I bought it, and promptly placed it on my to-read shelf. This was two years ago. But I’ve been itching to get to it since! And the new editions from FSG have some pretty awesome looking covers…

Here’s a bit of Vincent’s review:

The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve seen this sort of thing before in Ovid, Bulgakov, Kafka, and Rushdie to name a few. But the slim novel’s metaphysics are less striking than its blending of myths, serving the reader an exciting book that touches on the cannibalistic nature of story telling; any tale, regardless of time and place, is ripe for postmodern plucking and consumption.

To read the rest of the review, go here

The year is 1949, a fact quickly established by the primary narrator, Valdimar Haraldsson, Icelandic fish enthusiast and quasi-eugenicist. Haraldsson boards the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen, a merchant ship bound for the Black Sea, and encounters Caeneus, first mate and former Argonaut who, yes, sailed under Jason during his infamous quest for the Golden Fleece. This, regardless of the fact that the year is, again, 1949. This is the kind of book where none of those pesky rules of time and space carry any weight. Caeneus entertains the guests of the ship with after-dinner stories of his adventures with the Argonauts while stalled on the island of Lemnos amid comely enchantresses.

Caeneus’s inspiration comes from a splinter of wood he carries in his pocket—the titular whispering muse— a remnant of the long gone Argo. The mighty ship reduced to a mere splinter seems a good metaphor for the ethereal, the history lingering in our memories, the tiny specter that inspires and haunts all of us, but I suspect such readings are perhaps too heady for such a playful novel. Not to diminish any interpretive reading of The Whispering Muse, but I’m far happier savoring the goofy jumps from Caeneus’s story to Haraldsson’s absurd lecture on the superiority of the Nordic people, which he attributes to their fish consumption, than in picking it apart for deeper meaning. Perhaps this is because the novel’s breezy tone and brevity prevent me from looking at it as anything more than entertaining fabulism. The seafaring novel is constantly moving, sailing across narratives and landing nowhere near where I expected, instead stopping abruptly. A longer novel might have meandered, but Sjón keeps it slim and quick, a short effective burst of whimsy and surprise.

Despite the fun The Whispering Muse provides while reading—and it is a lot of fun—it was difficult to completely immerse myself in the book. Lyrical at times and certainly engaging, I was nevertheless detached from the events of the novel, witnessing them from afar. Critics of framed narratives sometimes complain of the frustration that can accompany distancing stories inside stories. Typically I do not agree, but here I sense that Sjón doesn’t necessarily care about his characters, which makes me wonder why I would invest anything in them. There are passages that amuse and delight, but the joy comes from the idea of what is happening rather than what is actually happening. This is not to say that the book is unsuccessful, but those who are looking for rich characterization need not crack open The Whispering Muse. Thankfully, I am less concerned with characters are more interested in the possibilities of the novel, which Sjón presents in 141 taut pages, beautifully translated by Victoria Cribb.

Larissa is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and with this continues her streak of Nordic lit reviews. LoveStar is a book I’ve been casting sidelong glances at here in the office, and have it high on my list of to-reads. But, with influences such as “Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kurt Vonnegut to George Orwell, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python,” Magnason is sure to please.

Here’s a bit from Larissa’s review:

When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can recall such a time.) He noted as much himself in a “[w]hen it came out in 2002 it was called a dystopian novel; now it’s being called a parody. We seem to have already reached that dystopia.”

It is difficult to create a fictional milieu that touches on anything remotely related to technology or The Future and doesn’t feel dated pretty much the minute the ink dries on the page. (My favorite example of this is the Ethan Hawke Hamlet adaptation, which came out in 2000 and was peppered with cutting edge technology . . . like fax machines and Polaroid cameras.) As such, it is no small accomplishment that in the ten years since LoveStar was released, the book feels not obsolete, but rather prescient, or at least exasperatingly plausible.

The novel kicks off at some indeterminate point in the future, after a series of freakish, but not cataclysmic, natural events lead a group of intrepid Icelandic scientists to seek wireless alternatives to current technology. (An oversaturation of “waves, messages, transmissions, and electric fields,” they believe, is to blame for such events as clouds of bees taking over Chicago, driving out residents and flooding the downtown area with ponds of honey.)

Head over here for the entire review.

It is difficult to create a fictional milieu that touches on anything remotely related to technology or The Future and doesn’t feel dated pretty much the minute the ink dries on the page. (My favorite example of this is the Ethan Hawke Hamlet adaptation, which came out in 2000 and was peppered with cutting edge technology . . . like fax machines and Polaroid cameras.) As such, it is no small accomplishment that in the ten years since LoveStar was released, the book feels not obsolete, but rather prescient, or at least exasperatingly plausible.

The novel kicks off at some indeterminate point in the future, after a series of freakish, but not cataclysmic, natural events lead a group of intrepid Icelandic scientists to seek wireless alternatives to current technology. (An oversaturation of “waves, messages, transmissions, and electric fields,” they believe, is to blame for such events as clouds of bees taking over Chicago, driving out residents and flooding the downtown area with ponds of honey.)

Then comes the dawn of the “the cordless man,” who can both communicate and be communicated to through entirely internal methods:

bq.When men in suits talked to themselves out on the streets and reeled off figures, no one took them for lunatics: they were probably doing business with some unseen client. The man who sat in rapt concentration on a riverbank might be an engineer designing a bridge . . . and when a teenager made strange humming noises on the bus, nodding his head to and fro, he was probably listening to an invisible radio.

None of this, of course, is too great an exaggeration on technology that has come into being in the last decade, and even the absurd advertising methods that quickly become the norm in the world of LoveStar feel accurate. People in debt can rent out their brains’ speech centers out and become “howlers,” automatically screeching advertisements or reminders at specific passersby (“I can’t believe that guy is still wearing a Blue Millets anorak!” or “_Dallas_ is starting!”). “Secret hosts” are hired by companies to go around surreptitiously selling their friends products within everyday conversations. And everything—from birth to love to death—is monetized and monopolized by one gigantic corporation and its subsidiaries: LoveStar.

All of this, it bears noting, is just prologue and backdrop to the novel’s main focus: such is the sheer density of the world that Andri Snær creates within just the first few chapters. There are two main plots that overlap, somewhat achronologically. One follows the executive LoveStar himself in the last hours of his life (Andri Snær has the founder of deCODE Genetics). The other plot follows the repeatedly thwarted attempts of a young couple, Indridi and Sigrid, trying to evade the corporate machinations that would break them apart from one another and re-pair them with their supposedly scientifically verifiable perfect partner.

There is a lot going on—arguably a little too much, as some of the larger themes get somewhat lost in the sweep of the (literally) explosive climax, or are, in some cases, grandly dramatized, but done so with little finesse. Though overall, it’s compulsively readable, due in great part to Andri Snær’s kooky creativity and the novel’s simple, straightforward style of prose (credit here to translator Victoria Cribb, who has translated, among others, three novels by Sjón and Gyrðir Elíasson’s Stone Tree).

Read today—in the wake of not only myriad technological advances, but also a worldwide financial meltdown the consequences of which were profoundly felt in Iceland, and will continue to be so for probably decades to come— LoveStar feels a bit like cracking open a time capsule. Its world is poised on the edge of implosion, held in check by only the tiniest bit of better judgement. “If we don’t do it,” LoveStar remarks before embarking on one last, ruinous power quest, “someone else will.”