When I realised this I started to think about the other things that find themselves in more than one story and, even though none of these tales is connected with any other, there is a feeling that some of the props have been shifted to another stage where a different scene is enacted. There are references to bookselling, bookbinding and writing as well as simply reading. I had assumed that the fact books appear in virtually every story was just that part of the author spilling over into his writing, but perhaps not so. Iceland has an exceptionally high rate of literacy - more books are produced per capita than in most other countries in the world.
Claustrophobia is, of course, a fear and the core of all fear is the unknown you might expect but you can’t know until you experience it, until you cross whatever boundary that keeps your fear from you. Considering these are stories set in the wide open spaces Elíasson manages to find the claustrophobic everywhere oftentimes his "strangely sensitive and quirky" characters bring it with them. Ironically there’s precious little of that in this book the landscape is there but we’re somehow distanced from it, or travel through it just to get to a decrepit guesthouse where we find ourselves trapped inside with the story’s protagonist. No, were I to go to I’d want to experience the “real Iceland”: a couple of geysers at least, a volcano perhaps, a fjord or two, something grand I could take photos of. If I want to visit a city there’s one just down the road. I’ve never been to Iceland but I imagine Reykjavík is like any other city, a cultural centre and a gateway to foreign parts. Whereas his contemporaries set their books in the cities and tackle life in the 20 th and 21 st centuries head on Elíasson shifts the action into the hinterland, “a realm by no means found on regular maps, for the author is, as he put it himself, a ‘mystical ruralist,’” as opposed to your everyday magical realist. His is a unique voice in modern Icelandic literature. The longest is the epic ‘The Summerbook’ which clocks up an impressive 9½ pages.Įlíasson was born in 1961 and is well known in his native Iceland, mainly as a poet, but his published prose work is growing now having four novels ( Walking squirrel, Paper boat train, Sleepcycling and The night lantern) and seven short story collections under his belt. Not quite short enough to be called ‘flash fiction’ most of these stories barely stretch any more than two or three pages. Gyrðir Elíasson’s tiny tales couldn’t be further from sagas if they tried.
I don’t know what I expected a book by an Icelandic writer to be like – it was probably rather shallow of me to expect it to be anything other than itself – but this little collection of short stories met my expectations head on and then body swerved them.
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