by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books)

Writing why Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller should win the Best Translated Book Award is like trying to describe a bizarre, exhausting dream that felt important but wound up buried too deep in your subconscious for words to make sense of now that you’re awake. As I was reading this beautiful mess by Iceland’s Guðbergur Bergsson I kept thinking to myself, how is this even a book? And how did translator Lytton Smith not descend into madness bringing it into English? This isn’t hyperbole, the book is that much. It’s a monumental piece of work in a meta sort of way, and that’s why it should win the BTBA.

Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is ostensibly a collection of fictitious notebooks written by a cranky old man with a mind full of literary brilliance and egotistical bitterness, a man with a lot of opinions who is generally ticked off about everything. Even though the book is printed in a standard typeface, it reads like journaling. It’s full of errors, has a haphazard page layout, and its elderly ramblings are often barely penetrable as they weave in and out of the fragmented Iceland stories and intellectual manifestoes. Sometimes the narrative switches recklessly from one topic to another without warning—I swear it switched mid-sentence at one point, but now I can’t find that part to tell you about it. As I was looking for this passage I did, however, find a page on which Tómas is complaining about the cat and right in the middle of his anecdote for some reason is written, “(something is wrong with the text here).” I also found another funny section where he’s unhappy about the kitchen habits of his tenants and says, “This is ugh and yeuch, Bubbi.” A big part of reading this book is noticing these foibles, laughing and baffling over them, and usually not finding a clear explanation for them. Instead, you just accept their absurdity and recognize that they are weirdly wonderful. Your own personal collection of these odd buried treasures is, I’d say, what you can look forward to taking away from your reading of this strange book.

I’m sure fictional character Tómas Jónsson, who is very much concerned with his literary image (the title tries to claim itself a “bestseller” after all), would not have wanted these notebooks published in the state of shambles they’re in. And that’s part of the book’s wild charm: it’s one of Iceland’s twentieth-century literary masterpieces, and yet it captures the exact opposite of, say, a poised and polished tale of Vikings or fairies (as an English-language reader might try to expect out of Iceland). Iceland is sloppy, frustrating, and grotesquely authentic in this book. It’s the literary equivalent of sneaking away from the tour guide taking you past all the tidy and respectable historical monuments in Reykjavik and instead venturing into an apartment building on a side street and peeking through a keyhole into the gritty, authentic domestic life going on in there, with its chamber pots, chipped dishes, laundry messes, and smells of soup. But that metaphor doesn’t go far enough—you’re looking not just inside an apartment, but deep into the mind of the man who owns it, which becomes a rare glimpse into the psyche of Iceland itself.

In trying to describe Bergsson’s book, I feel I’ve written an inevitable word salad, perhaps not dissimilar to the salads of Tómas Jónsson himself. I don’t think I’ve really gotten to the crux of why this book should win the BTBA, which aims to award both the book and the translation. So on that point: imagine what a labyrinth of rabbit holes and mayhem this book was for a translator to contend with. How did he even know what was happening from one sentence to the next!? How does one faithfully translate a text that borders on impenetrable into something that can be even be read? Lytton Smith not only got the job done, he did it with humor, nuance, and beauty. He let the crazy stuff be opaque and difficult, but also depicted those scattered moments of poetic beauty and philosophical wisdom with the artful language necessary for a reader to discover them amid the textual chaos. He also made sure the silly parts about cats, chickens, and chamber pots came through with the punchy cadence they deserved. So the translation is a feat in and of itself, and the book finally finding its way into English is a triumph of Iceland’s literary community, which has kept Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, originally published in 1966, from slipping off the radar and into obscurity all this time (as you might expect such a loose baggy monster in a relatively obscure language to do).

I’ve not read all of the finalists, but I’m confident no other translation vying for the Best Translated Book Award in 2018 simply is what it is with as much vigorous impossibility as Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. Not even Fever Dream. Even if this paragraph amounts to more word salad, let that vigorous impossibility be the reason this book should win.

As previously noted, the next season of the Two Month Review will feature two books by Mercè Rodoreda: and Click here to get the full schedule, and use the 2MONTH code at to get 20% off. (That discount code also works for “Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller”: and “The Invented Part.”: And if you’d rather support your local bookstore, do it! They should have all of these titles. If not, shame them. Preferably in a very public way. Kidding, totally kidding. Obviously every store carries all of our books.)

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This week, Tom Flynn of returns to the Two Month Review to talk about three of the more difficult bits of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller: one section that’s a dream, one about mediums and resurrection, and one that’s a poem for going to bed and for death. Thanks to Tom’s perceptive insights and Lytton’s genius, they’re able to puzzle out all three sections and provide some solid guidance for everyone reading along.

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Reminder! On September 30th, we will be recording the final episode of this season of the Two Month Review at in Brooklyn as part of The First Lady of Iceland, Eliza Reid, will kick things off at 2pm with a lecture and reading, then at 3pm, Lytton and Chad will discuss the final section of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller (and take audience questions), followed by a recpetion at 4pm. It’s free to attend, so come on out and see us do this live!

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Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

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Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. Please rate us on iTunes and/or leave a review!

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by The Anchoress.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is available at better bookstores everywhere, and you can also order it directly from where you can get 20% off by entering 2MONTH in the discount field at checkout.

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Over the next few weeks—or the next few podcasts, next few chapters—you’re going to get a much clearer picture of the main themes of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller and, more interestingly, how complicated it is to read and react to these core ideas. I don’t want to go too deep on this before we get to those sections of the book, but to provide a sort of outline of the narrative’s engine: There’s a great tension in this novel revolving around the desire to mythologize the past/masculinity/national pride/the self, and the inherent dangers in doing so.

At times Tómas is aware of how troubling this impulse can be, critical of nationalism, concerned about the men trolling the streets for drunken ladies and lewd moments. At other times we get Tómas saying some awful shit about his lodgers, and maybe doing some inappropriate things. (Although, as you’ll see, some of these implied activities are buried under heaps of ambiguous and contradictory information.)

In the “fifth composition book” we get a couple of key bits that set up future readings of Tómas’s character. Specifically, this is a chapter in which perceived humiliations—and a general discomfort with self—fuels Tómas’s current aggressive crankiness to everyone around him. This oftentimes puts the reader in an awkward position where, on the one hand, you feel sympathetic to Tómas, but on the other, he does (or says, or writes) some reprehensible shit.

Couple quick examples from this chapter, which is loaded with lines about all the disrespect Tómas has, and does, suffer.

Lying pancake-flat without moving my legs or joints in order to protect myself: the threshold, gold bronze baseboards, the faucet tips, the cabinet doors, sensitive to ridicule because of my outtie, when everyone use has a beautiful innie, each and every member of the Homeowners’ Association. I could not go to the meetings because of the risk that someone would bend down and say: There’s some sort of pimple poking out your knitted vest. Perhaps it is just a button made of bone on my trouser string, I would say. He would believe me, and soon a rumor starts that I have a wart on my belly. People’s curiosity would increase, ending with a proposal for required swimming for the organization’s members; no one is allowed to leave, or else he would lose his favorable rental terms. And when I stood there naked (having given up on finding an old-fashioned swimsuit, the sort that offers privacy above the navel; swimming trunks nowadays only cover a man’s genitals), the belly button, Angler, would be exposed (I had named my navel Angler), and they would burst out laughing and say: rent, and rent at high cost.

And then there’s this extended description of how Tómas views himself, punctuated by an invasive bit of disrespect at the end:

In a large mirror, between the nymphs and satyrs on the ashtray, I loomed large, made into a massive picture: an almost globular head with a freckled scalp and hairy ears: gray, obstinate tufts. The image turned carefully to the side: deep folds on the neck, slightly red (clear now) from friction against a stiff collar. A night-shadow beard, white and mad-spiked, peeks from the vein-split skin; a thick club nose with coarse nostrils and a greasy bridge; moss-eared; under the shoulder straps of his undershirt, by the bluish vein-marked chest, grow frost gray blotches; his abdomen swells out over thin curd-white feet which reveal the picture is sitting in a chair: the image steps onto the chair, lifts his torso and rakes white nails over the curd-white flesh of his clammy, cold belly; the image tries to perform some desperate hand movements but becomes increasingly thwarted in spite of his morning’s exercise; it presses its face fast against the mirror to examine its mouth: the red uvula dripping drool; a throat covered with blue veins; the scabrous palate; the lappet under the tongue; the darkened teeth. The treads of the teeth marked by seventy-seven years cycling past. The image got goose bumps and sighed as it thought: I’ve become this sorrowful old picture. He plunked himself on the rim of the tub and sighed again. This man deserves rewards for his age and his decency. Here you sit. This is you. No, I was not allowed to think like that for long. The door was grabbed from outside, the knob yanked, twice. What, is the door locked, who’s loitering on the toilet. I dove into my clothes, hesitated a moment, and doggedly resisted. I and I alone decide how long I will sit on the toilet, I thought.

And then there’s this succinct statement of defeat and despair:

I threw myself on the bed, defeated. Obviously I was not man enough to openly oppose disgrace even in the confines of my own home.

These self-deprecating, woe-is-me sentiments are offset in this chapter by Tómas’s general complaints about his lodgers (like the public affection between Sveinn and Katrín), and their kids, (the forever lonely Tómas is irked by both). He insults both females in various ways—the creepy bathroom scene with Katrín, then the insults of Anna as a “devious personage”—before merging them into one (Annakatrín), imaging one of them basically raping him, then creating an odd sort of folk tale in which a woman seduces the old king (stand in for Tómas) in order to get some of his royal blood into her offspring, thus giving her cause to take over the kingdom (or apartment).

Like I said at the start, there are times where you feel for this old, unrespected crank; there are times when you see him lashing out at possibly imagined abuses in ways that are pretty off-putting.

One more quick thing about the “fifth composition book” before moving on, and that’s the very last paragraph in which a new “I” emerges, seemingly the musician living with Tómas who gives us a hint of Tómas’s reality:

I remember how the man was utterly opposed to her dress, practically allergic to it. It sometimes happened, especially in winter, that they would meet by chance in the hallway early in the morning, as she tussled at coat hooks “herding the kids by their ass-ears,” as she put it, off to school (the children were not particularly eager to learn). They got a lot of pleasure from the electric guitar (and also its square meter sounds; it was astonishing to me that the man Tómas could measure sound in meters); I played in a dance band at night while studying at the university. If he should pass in the corridor during this tussle, she made sure to swing her hip into him, as he made a detour in attempt to avoid conflict and sneak out. This little contact resulted in the appearance the next day of red patches on the lower part of his forehead between his eyes; they spread around his nose and eyes. These spots gave way to gray scabs, a kind of dandruff crust. He was always fiddling with his nose and rubbing the dandruff from his eyebrows with his fingertips, blowing it away so the dust didn’t land on his jacket. He twitched and groped instinctively about his eyebrows. This chaffed skin plagued him typically for three to four weeks, then disappeared, but his forehead flushed in the cold. [. . .] The first day in the refectory, I was quite surprised to see old Tómas Jónsson there, sitting next to me at the table. I partially pitied the man, how cautiously he went to dinner with that skin on his forehead it was; primarily because of the appearance of these fish-scales that his eyes seemed weary of pleasure, marked by life, though food seemed to awaken pleasure in him.

There’s a lot that could be unpacked from “VI.” But to keep this post somewhat readable, and to keep some surprises for the podcast and your own personal reading, I’m just going to focus on two things—The Board and Tómas’s ridicule of writers.

The Board section takes place from pages 117-139, and is one of the most lucid, compelling sections of the book so far.

In brief, Tómas—along with seemingly all other major characters—take their meals at this particular refectory. The dining hall is split into two main sections—the inner room and the outer room. As with most any lunchroom ever, the “less important” people sit in the outer area, and the most important sit at The Board—the main table in the inner room.

Although there was no visible boundary between the rooms, except the plinths and flowers, the pensioners were divided according to their rank at work. In the inner room sat people who engaged in clean work; in the anterior were others who performed dirty work. [. . .] At the long table in the inner room, which in canteen parlance was The Board [. . .] The nucleus of the Board was four bank employees (I never reached this nucleus), a woman, two ladies who worked alternately in stationary stores or bookstores, a year at each place in sequence, they said, to make life varied and diverse. They were nicknamed the porcelains. Also in the nucleus were two middle-aged women and a housing adviser who never spoke to anyone, or rarely. The Board was considerably snobbish, looking down on we who claimed to have an all-round understanding of the human being.

This section is spectacular in its detailed account of the way The Board functions. In particualr, Ólaf and Sigurdur—both of whom were introduced earlier as bank employees, with Ólaf taking the promotion Tómas believed he deserved—are fleshed out, and act as sort of stand ins for the pompousness and blather of The Board as a whole. The Board is exactly the sort of group of people who know everything, yet like to pretend they’re intellectually curious. They debate politics in passionate tones, but switch opinions whenever it will get them more attention or score some points on their opponents. They’re incredibly proud and invested in the grand history of Iceland, yet ridicule the young students who adopt traditional Icelandic names when they come over to study the sagas and folklore. It’s a ball of contradictions, and exactly what you can imagine such a group of people would be like.

And where’s Tómas in all of this? Not on The Board, but not in the outer room either. He’s on the fringes, watching and judging, feeling both slighted and superior. Being Tómas Jónsson, in other words.

There’s so much greatness in this section, in the way that Bergsson—through the voice of Tómas—lays out the internal politics of this dining hall. It’s a section that comes at the perfect moment, grounding the reader in an entertaining fashion that also fills in some gaps about what’s come before. But again, given how fun—and relatively comprehensible—this section is, I’m just going to leave things there for now.

And just for fun, let’s end with some of Tómas’s comments about writers. (Once again, we have his sort of line-straddling—he’s making fun of writers, in a book that he’s writing . . . a biography . . . that’s going to be a bestseller.)

In truth, fiction is a superstition spun in the fabric of people who neither know nor want to know life itself. LIFE IS NOT IN BOOKS. If the writers and poets wrote about men at work and during their leisure, fiction would be superfluous. Should a writer, however, construct some narrative that does not exist in reality but rather takes reality’s place, i.e. the only true fiction, fantasy and imagination, then no one can understand it but the writer himself (supposing even he understands it). With this eliminated, nothing should be left but writing biographies. Fictions are useless to every living human. On the path of life, people meet others who are much closer to their problems and to real environments than those in novels.

The following reasons are the basis of why I do not read literature:

I do not read novels. They are written with secret revenge in mind, the revenge of craven writers who shrink from coming clean and spitting filth and obscenities in the faces of people on the street. [. . .] Writers are not physicians but the carriers of infection who weep from their various individual sores and bestow those same sores upon the nation. [. . .] Writers are always being revived. The dead must stay dead, I say. I want to beat them all to death. I have gained a new understanding of death: I kill a writer every time I read a book. Why should writers live longer than anyone else. Do they achieve more. They have no legal right to extra days than we who complete our full day’s work up to evening.

Of course, as he says elsewhere, “Note: I am invariably writing a veiled self-portrait.” All of Tómas’s internal contractions are about to get ramped up, so prepare yourself.

Also discussed in this episode is for Conversational Reading.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

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You can follow Scott Esposito on and or at And you can get his latest book, The Doubles, from

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