Mondays in Iceland -#123

The Darkness Knows

A novel by Arnaldur Indriðason
Translated by Victoria Cribb

It has been a few years since there have been any new English translations of novels by Arnaldur Indriðason. Arnaldur is best known for his 14 Detective Inspector Erlendur novels, he has been writing and publishing in Icelandic regularly but I suspect that the recent explosion of translated Icelandic novels has caused a backlog (this book was first published in 2017 and is just now available in English.) When Arnaldur started his career (in the late 1990s), he was one of only a handful of Icelandic writers being translated into English. Now there are dozens of quality books by Icelandic authors making the ‘leap across the pond’ every year—truly an embarrassment of riches. The golden age of Icelandic literature is NOW.

The Darkness Knows is the first novel in a series featuring Konráð, a retired Reykjavík police detective. The story begins when a tour group discovers a body frozen in a glacier. The body belonged to a man who went missing thirty years previously and the chief suspect in his disappearance (who had never been charged) had become close to Konráð, uncomfortably so, and so asks to see Konráð after he is re-arrested. Konráð meets with the man, who protests his innocence but in such a way that there remains doubt about his story. There are also sub-plots concerning a victim of a hit-and-run accident and Konráð’s relationship with his father (who was a minor criminal and conman) who had died when Konráð was a teen. I suspect that relationship will be more fully developed in the later books (there are already three more that have yet to be translated.) Konráð, a widower, is a melancholy figure (but not nearly as cranky as the Erlendur character was in that previous series) but has a much darker backstory,  which I also assume will also be explored in future books. The writing, as is usually the case with Indriðason, is terse and direct, making the somewhat complex story line easier to follow and, if you are familiar with Reykjavík, the description of the story’s settings add color to the story. The plot is logical, but still manages to take a sharp turn or two. I found the ending to be surprisingly touching. One of the joys of following Indriðason’s novels is the ‘slow burn’ of character development over the series. This augurs well for the remaining titles—or it just might be that I find a perverse pleasure (self-identification?) in reading about idle pensioners. Konráð is the antithesis of a television action-detective.

Victoria Cribb’s translations, after a shaky beginning, have become faultless—she is now one of the best in doing Icelandic to English.

Recommended.

The Last Book

Laterna Magica


By William Heinesen
Translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally
Fjord Press, Seattle, 1987

The road out to Gray Skull Wharf, where everything ends, is a long one. With many twists and turns and cul-de-sacs, it passes through a thousand-year-old city.

We are in no hurry, and on this belated journey we will not take things like chronology and causality too seriously either. We feel just like children playing in the twilight, who are reluctant to go home to bed as long as there is still light in the sky and the beautiful day is not entirely over. And the old boatman, sitting in his ferry and waiting at the end of the world, is a wise man, after all. He knows the whims and caprices of the human heart, and its untimely yearning for the unreachable. He will surely grant us a reprieve for a little longer. You'll see– he has probably lit his pipe and is sitting there in his gray wolfskin enjoying himself as he gazes out over the deep with experienced seaman's eyes, to where the beginning and the end meet and shake hands with each other, as the darkness falls.

William Heinesen was born at the turn of the 20th century in Tórshavn in the Faroes, a group of islands in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland. He was considered the greatest of the Faroese writers and although he wrote in Danish, his work revolves around everyday life in the Faroes. This collection of stories, loosely connected by the thread spun in the preface reprinted above, was written with the intention of being his final work. Tiina Nunally's elegant translation is always concise and poetic.

Heinesen's intention was to have one last go at telling the stories of the people of his life, they are tales from a time that is long gone, an old man's look at those memories of things that have stayed with him over a long life. The stories are simultaneously magical and realistic. Love unrequited, passions leading to ruination, life in a small town in all its facets- with all its joys and heartbreaks.

These are simple stories, told in a straightforward manner. A travelogue, if you will, to the ends of the earth and the center of the human heart.

Highly recommended.

Iceland Airwaves Day Four

The final day of airwaves has come and gone. It was a day of subtle joys and a major disappointment. We spent the afternoon with DJ Cousin Mary and her husband Ken at the Hitt Husið, a community center for teens in downtown Reykjavík. The first performer was Hekla, not the thereminist that I had hoped for but, rather, an unassuming young woman singing songs of things important to her. It was a very sweet and honest, albeit shaky at times, performance:



Jóhanna Elísa led a six piece band with her fine playing and singing.
The string arrangements were superb:



We saw Between Mountains again, this was a much better venue for their emotional songs of the heart:



And we just had to stay to see Ateria again. They were in their element here, surrounded by friends and family. There are some very weird currents running through their music, who knows what darkness lurks in the minds of Icelandic teen-age girls?



After a break for dinner (monkfish, yum!), we went over to Floí,  a large multi-purpose room in the Harpa complex. The first act was the Faroese performer Eivør, an experienced veteran who sang, played guitar, and wielded a Celtic drum, all to great effect:

Not so great was the next act, Team Dreams: Sin Fang, Sóley & Örvar Smárason. In fact it was a disaster; quite possibly the worst musical performance of any kind I have ever endured. They announced that it would be their last gig. It sounded as if the band had already broken up  some time ago. An atrocious sound mix turned it into torture:



Finally, JFDR, who I've been wanting yearning to see perform again since I last saw her in Samaris in 2012:



The sound problems continued, almost destroying her set. She did fine when she was on her own—singing and playing guitar—but additional instruments were way out of balance. Various mid-bass and low-mid resonances made for a very unpleasant experience. Others told me that it wasn't as bad in the rear of the room, perhaps I was in a bad spot, although reviews in the Grapevine also mentioned the bad sound in Floí.

Here is a video of one of the songs of her performance:



Although Airwaves is over, I'll be back tomorrow with more…

Yesterdays Airwaves coverage…

Arnaldur Indriðason

FITK reviews of novels by the noted Icelandic mystery/thriller writer:

In English publication order:

Jar City (aka Tainted Blood) (2004)
Silence of the Grave (2005)
Arctic Chill (2005)
Voices (2006)
The Draining Lake (2007)
Hypothermia (2009)
Operation Napoleon (2010)
Outrage (2011)
Black Skies (2012)
Strange Shores (2013)
Reykjavík Nights (2014)
Into Oblivion (2015)
The Shadow District (2016)
The Darkness Knows (2017)
The Shadow Killer (2018)
The Girl on the Bridge (2018)
The Quiet Mother (2019)

A guide to the Inspector Erlendur Series in continutity order here.

Them

Them. Those mysterious, faceless, powers-that-be that mess up everybody's lives. I'm talking about those nefarious forces of darkness who take it upon themselves to mess with the time and the calendar. Daylight savings time is just plain annoying, and "they" keep changing it- it was year-round in the seventies, it is now longer than it was a few years ago, and depending on where exactly you live in your time zone, your "high noon" can be an hour's difference anyway!

Then there are the holiday shenanigans. The Fourth of July fireworks are on the Third in our town- and the celebration of Halloween can be as much as a week away from the actual date! There are movements afoot to start school before Labor Day (sacrilege! BTW, did you know that Finland, which gets the highest achievement scores has the fewest school days?) Easter? Who knows?

And don't get me started on President's day.

At least Thanksgiving is always the same.

Makt Myrkanna

Powers of Darkness
Makt Myrkanna (Icelandic title)

Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897
Written by Valdimar Ásmundsson, 1901
Translated and annotated by Hans Corneel de Roos, 2017

Whew! This book took me on a strange trip into a more obscure part of the Dracula canon.

When Bram Stoker first published Dracula he made an effort to get it translated into as many languages as possible. Valdimar Ásmundsson was an Icelandic scholar who dabbled in many things literary. He evidently hit it off with Stoker and this was the result. Originally published in serial form, it was assembled into a book and subsequently reprinted in Icelandic a couple of times, it remained largely unknown to the English-speaking world for over a century. It has now been translated: with copious notes, a foreword by one of Stoker’s descendants, and even Bram Stoker’s original introduction.

None of this would matter much excepting that this book is quite different from the original English version; it is much sexier and is even more political—the Count comes across as sort of a 18th century Transylvanian Donald Trump. In another twist it has characters not in the Stoker book, but were in Stoker’s original notes! The first part of the story, with Harker in the castle, is greatly expanded, while the second part, with the Count in England, is merely sketched out.

I found it fascinating that Iceland, with a population of about 70,000 in 1901, could produce such a book. There is also a Swedish version! Who knows what other treasures await?