The Book of Reykjavik (ed. Vera Júlíusdóttir and Becca Parkinson)
Review by Jess Moody
In the Book of Reykjavik ten contemporary writers present an eclectic set of short (sometimes very short) stories of Iceland’s sole city. Here they explore nature’s confrontations with creeping urbanity; friendships and affairs amidst cafes and bars; and the ghosts of both drowned sailors and abandoned machines.
New visitors to the ‘Reading the City’ series might be surprised by the foreword to this collection, which introduces Reykjavik quite bluntly as a ‘Gomorrah’, a city seen in the historic Icelandic psyche as a place of sin and sinners (albeit now glossed with hipster chic). But here (as with recent offerings like the Book of Venice and Book of Shanghai) Comma Press knows that literature in translation is so much more than literary tourism, a ‘rough guide’ to local landmarks and potted histories: instead a city’s literary microcosm is a breathing shifting conversing thing.
In these city snapshots of course we find the globally recognised Icelandic traits and tropes. There are many nods to the small size – the ‘tight-knit’ – community of the city. There is the nightlife, there is snow, and coffee, and hot pools, and the economic crash. But the range of voices and histories in the collection shows the more complicated and often untidy lives of Reykjavik’s residents (new, old and returning).
In Magnason’s ‘Keep Sleeping, My Love’ (trans. Lytton Smith), the reliability of a couple’s anniversary tradition (watching a sunset over the glacier-capped mountain, no less) starts to waver. In ‘Two Foxes’ (Halldórsson, trans. Larissa Kyzer) another marriage stalls: a man smokes outside his luxury new-build, caught in the glance of a fox, and old memories. Sex, queerness, and complex attractions make for endings both unsettled and liberated in ‘Without you, I’m Half’ (Eiríksdóttir, trans. Kyzer) and ‘Reykjavik Nights’ (Jónsdóttir, trans. Matich). These stories challenge any sense of the picturesque or uncritiqued romanticism, never more so in ‘Home’ (trans. Kyzer) where Isberg’s protagonist walks alone through the early hours, in a freezing depiction of gendered threat. Even Icelandic nights are yet to be reclaimed.
These contradictions and tussles – intimacy and solitude, lovers and siblings, city and nature, learning and instinct – unite the collection. They make for an edgy welcome to a city that has embraced the art of double-meaning, of translation, and looking in and out from a very particular standpoint. Such specificity and duality is best captured in ‘The Gardeners’ (Guðmundsson, trans.Cribb), a strange beast of a story. Three farming brothers flee cold rural poverty to become gardeners in the growing city, their success due, ironically, to their traditional skillsets:
‘They made outer walls either of stone, often with thin grassy turf strips between the courses, or entirely of turf blocks, which looked from a distance like a row of books on a shelf; the horizontal strips resembling shelves and the turf blocks the thick spines of books. Today, such men are so rare that people scour the country for them. Their fingers possess a knowledge that has been lost.’
This side-eye perspective that can turn rough cold lava-blocks to literature and back again continues throughout the story: the brothers swapping houses with an irascible scholar who retreats back to their abandoned farm. It is only in leaving the City (or taking it with him?) that he finds academic success, becoming something of a folk hero, who fact-checks international dialects through chats with dead wrecked sailors. Iceland: land of learning, ghosts, and polyglots, never far from the cold reality of the sea.
Unlike other capitals, Reykjavik is not just a city, it is the city, of not only a country, but an island, and one that loves its language, and its stories. It is home to two-thirds of Icelandic speakers, yet speaks with many voices. This collection provides a tantalising glimpse into the City’s cultural climate, its storytellers unafraid of the darker side of this place of grey nights, shifting obsessions, and haunted horizons.
Featuring: Friðgeir Einarsson, Kristín Eiríksdóttir, Þórarinn Eldjárn, Einar Már Guðmundsson, Björn Halldórsson, Fríða Ísberg, Auður Jónsdóttir, Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir, Andri Snær Magnason & Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson
Translators: Philip Roughton, Victoria Cribb, Larisssa Kyzer, Meg Matich, and Lytton Smith
The Book of Reykjavic is published by Comma Press, 12th August 2021