Customer Reviews

Icelander

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is Dustin Long's first novel Icelander and I can't recommend this book highly enough. Although the premise is slightly confusing, you are soon caught up in the plot and by page fifty or so it becomes that rarest of things: a literary page-turner. The book focuses partly on the discovery, commercialization, and quest for independence of a fictional underground Icelandic kingdom called Vanaheim. Most of the action, however, takes place in the U.S.A. in upstate New Uruk on "Bean Day," a local celebration of the deceased adventuress Emily Bean, who along with her family discovered Vanaheim. Despite the book's humorous tone, there are a number of surprisingly moving characters - French-Canadian ex-cop Blaise Duplain struggling to come to terms with and solve the murder of his wife; Jon Ymirson an aging adventure hero stricken with Alzheimers; and his daughter "Our Heroine," in a Hamlet-like state of indecision over following in her deceased mother's adventure-seeking footsteps. At many points in the book I laughed out loud or marveled at the author's clever use of language. (Also watch for hidden clues throughout the book). My favorite parts include overly self-conscious actor Nathan, philosophical investigators Wible and Pacheco, the fox-shirted Refurserkir (guardians of Vanaheim), and rogue library scientist Hubert Jörgen. If you love (but don't mind poking fun at) mysteries, Nabokov, Norse mythology, adventure novels, literary pretentiousness, and Hamlet (the Thomas Kyd version) order the book!

Icelander takes place in a sort of Scandinavia - obsessed alternate reality where there is a separate underground kingdom beneath Iceland. The book and its mystery are quite an interesting and creative concept, but unfortunately I found actually reading the book to be rather dull, and I didn't care greatly what happened to the characters, though I think I would have liked the dead woman, too bad she was dead for most of the book, except in flashbacks. I certainly enjoyed her two-story house. I have a clue as to which character is the author of the footnotes, was I supposed to be able to tell for sure?

A fun, whimsical and stylish postmodern journey replete with colorful characters, meta-narrative hi-jinks, and writing that isn't afraid to show its literary influences. Wible & Pacheco, the metaphysical investigating duo, are particularly enjoyable ("Typography cannot convey the essence of our subsequent screams"). At times, however, the homage devolves into tropes too blatantly unoriginal to ignore. To wit: Besides the protagonist, Our Heroine, who mirrors The Crying of Lot 49's Oedipa Maas, the novel directly summons Thomas Pynchon at several points, none more clearly than a floating paragraph on pp. 50-51, where Our Heroine watches the snowflakes and contemplates them as indecipherable hieroglyphics from the sky that escape her understanding. The segment recalls the famous paragraph early in The Crying of Lot 49 where Oedipa Maas looks out over the San Narcisso landscape and sees it as a printed circuit, riddled with hieroglyphics imbued with meaning but "just past the threshold of her understanding." Similarly, Long conjures up Paul Auster's deconstruction of the detective novel, City of Glass, when, among other things, he equates the winding ambles of his characters through the streets in coded symbolic terms when viewed from above. All in all, however, Icelander is an entertaining little romp.

one of the best things about this novel is its ability to appeal to various types of readers on different levels. it can function as a simple mystery novel to the casual reader by simply ignoring the footnotes and following along with the story to find out "who killed shirley." which is what i chose to do my first time around.
Long, however, has crafted a dense, multi-layered novel that is able to offer you as much as you seek to get out of it. my book group recently discussed Icelander in a conference call with the author and he expressed his hope that this would be one people would want to read more than once in order to see it from a number of different angles. upon first reading you could go straight through and enjoy the simple mystery of it. read it again and start to connect all the dots the plot lays out. read it again and truly understand all the convergences between the fictional Emily Bean memoirs, the story line and characters and all the clues scattered throughout. by his own admission, Long's short stories are "almost good" so i wouldn't use them as a factor when deciding whether you will read this, his first novel, which is an ambitious and successful work. he also admitted that his previous, unpublished books were "self-indulgent and post-modern to a fault" and you can sense in Icelander tha,t although it bears the mark of McSweeney's some have come to scorn, it aims to entertain and provoke thoughts, not alienate.

I can see how people might not like this book, not because it isn't great (it is) but because it's a type of book that doesn't appeal to everybody maybe. It's funny and mysterious, but it's not a straightforward mystery or comedy. It's thought-provoking. It's definitely one that needs to be read twice. But it's so fun that it's a pleasure both times. But that said, if you are scared off by books that require a little work, or by books that aren't exactly like everything else you're used to reading, then maybe this isn't the book for you. But if you're willing to try something different and new, then this just might become your favorite book of all time. I'm waiting for the third read before deciding on that issue.

When a friend pointed me at this book, she advised, "It's very post-modern." Yes, yes it is, and loads of fun besides. I'm not going to try to describe it as a whole - not for fear of dropping any spoilers, no matter what you say about it, it fails to make the book any less of a mystery. Rather, I'll just make some peripheral points about it, just as the book itself doesn't come out and tell the murder mystery plot but only tells bits of the story around it.

Item: the protagonist is known only as "Our Heroine" throughout; Hiro Protagonist, step aside.

Item: there have been murder mysteries where the macguffin is a lost Shakespeare play; in "Icelander," Shirley MacGuffin is killed over a lost Thomas Kyd play.

Item: Hubert Jorgens, "rogue library-scientist...blacklisted from any jobs within the mainstream library-science community"!

Item: the footnotes. Here's an extract from one of my favorites, which describes Vanaheim, the underground country living in caves beneath Iceland, whose struggle for national independence is the motivation for some of Our Heroine's antagonists: "We await the day that Vanaheim, like an unruly footnote, will rise to overwhelm the would-be master text of topside Iceland."

Item: though this is apparently the author's first work, it is presented as the latest in a long series. Every character, on their first appearance in the story, gets an introductory paragraph recapping which of Our Heroine's family's previous adventures they appeared in.

The only quibbles I can make about the book are: I'm modern enough I'd like just a *little* more of the story to be explicit, I can't figure out what "Angus O'Malvins" is an anagram of, and the title is misleading in that the only character who appears to be an Icelander is distinctly a supporting role. (Well, plus several Vanaheimers.)

This first novel is too precious for its own good. Have hopes for the author's next attempt because of glimmers of wit and narrative skill amidst the density of tiresome allusions and lumpy logophilia (all of which would have been funnier if not laid on with a trowel). [I recommend Michel Faber's The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps as an example of this kind of flight done well, albeit not in a humorous vein.]

An excellent book: a rollicking plot, screwball comedy, imaginative world building, insightful meta-fiction, tenderness, intrigue, love, war, peace, playfulness, seriousness, and endless list of adjectives and descriptors that add up to an astonishing work.
Just read, you wont be able to put it down, but it isn't so long that you'll likely starve to death.

Yes, this book is cute. Just look at that cover! I bet people buy it solely for that alone. I'll admit, it was one of the selling points for me.
But beyond that was a good book. A very good book. Much like others have said, it's akin to Agatha Christie, which madcap characters and foes, along with faux Icelandic lore. It's humorous and smart and a perfectly quick read for the weekend. I'll be rereading it shortly, just because I found it so fun.
You should really buy this book and enjoy it for yourself!

This was a quirky little tale. It's written in the style of an grown-up Lemony Snicket book. It also brings to mind Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails and The Third Policeman. A fun and enjoyable read.