Voices

"A voice like an angel" - and here he is, dead as a doornail, wearing a Santa Claus suit in a Reyjkavik hote.

Arnaldur Indriđason: Engelsstimme. 2002. (Icelandic title: Röddin, English title: Voices)

Another Erlendur thriller, but it's rather boring. Or maybe it's me watching these Beck films while reading this. Police officers my age and a bit older are overweight, noticing their age, missing female companionship, and have cases to solve.
I pretty much had to force myself to read a chapter each night. The plot is a bit thin, although it does lurch nicely back and forth. Maybe the melancholy just got to me too much. Anyway, I finished it, check, on to the next!

Flateyjargáta - Flatey Mystery

Just finished an Icelandic mystery novel by Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson, Flateyjargáta (Flatey Mystery). It interweaves a blood-thirsty Icelandic saga, the Flateyjarbók with a modern day rash of murders on the island of Flatey in the Breiðafjörður, the largest fjord on the west coast of Iceland.

The novel depicts life on an island that only has the post boat calling once a week. The inhabitants live off the fish, seals, birds, and eider feathers they can collect from nature. Nothing exciting happens here - and then first one dead man is found, then another.

The deaths are linked to a puzzle surrounding the saga that has an interesting solution, as well as a surprising ending to the whole story. This is not for the weak-kneed, I quit reading the puzzle bits after about 13 (there are 39 in all) and I most certainly do not want to see the movie on this one.

But it was quite a page-turner, I read it on the plane to England and back and then stayed up until 2am last night to finally finish it off. I look forward to his other books!

Bítlaávarpið (Beatles Manifesto)

t's vacation time - time to read some books instead of just exercises and theses...

In anticipation of the Icelandic refresher course I'll be taking the second half of August I decided to read Einar Már Guðmundsson's Beatle's Manifesto in Swedish. My Icelandic is so rusty, I don't think I can do this in Icelandic, and it's not translated into English or German. Kind of wierd, though, to be reading about Iceland in Swedish. But the translator did a good job, there are many bits that are quite of Icelandic flavor.

Einar Már. One of the "bad boys" about my age who write books or make films or both. Apparently, they all pretty much went to school together, my Icelandic friend Bina was in the same class as Einar Már, she showed me her school yearbook and I had a good laugh at all of the guys she went to school with.

Anyway, it is a typical book of this type, I suppose. Short chapters - 3 to 5 pages - because guys don't have long attention spans. Lots of silly trouble he and his pals got into. Lots of pissing - don't take bottles of "Sinalco" from young guys that don't have their caps on tight, you may be in for a not-so-sweet bottle of liquid. Actually, one of the pissing stories actually made me laugh (normally I just find them gross). A guy was pissing - illegally - against the wall in a drunken state. A cop tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned around to face the cop, still pissing, and wet the trouser leg of the cop.

And then there is the love factor, Helga. He actually writes something of sense at the end: no matter how bad boys treat girls, if they are in love with them nothing can shake them. He himself is quite in love with Helga, but manages to make a monkey out of himself innumerable times (most especially in the final episode).

I read the book about 4/5 of the way through, then there were more exciting things to do: clean the house, cut the grass, do the laundry. But I don't like non-finished books, so I finished it off today. Okay, Einar Már, we've had lots of little boy and growing-up boy and teenage boy stories from you. Now that you are middle aged, can you write about anything else? I'll check out the bookshops when I get to Iceland.