Tales from the Bitface

This is a very odd little book. Laxness won the Nobel for Literature back in the fifties, but I had never heard of him before I read Jack Deighton’s review of it earlier this year. This is often the way with Nobel laureates, or so it seems to me. The committee members know of many more writers than you or I.

In her introduction, Susan Sontag includes science fiction in the group of labels of ‘outlier status’ which apply to this novel. Only, I would say, if some characters believing they are ‘in communion with the galaxies’ makes it so. Yet it somehow has something of the feel of SF. Maybe because our unnamed narrator is exploring a landscape in which he is lost and confused.

It’s the psychological landscape of a small community who live by the titular glacier, though. And that glacier — Snæfells — is the same one Jules Verne’s characters start their Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Which gives it a tentative connection to one of our ur-texts. But nothing explicitly fantastical happens. Unless it does. Resurrection? Maybe. Somebody disappearing mysteriously? Possibly.

We, the reader, are as lost and confused by the behaviours of the characters as is the narrator, who has been sent by the bishop of Iceland to find out what has been going on in the distant parish.

It muses on a lot of ideas (SF is ’the literature of ideas’, of course, so there’s that), but has no plot as such. It’s intriguing, though, and well worth a read.

Most sites describe How to Solve Your Own Murder as ‘cosy crime’, which I suppose it is. It has a first-person protagonist, so the reader doesn’t think there’s much chance she’ll die. She does find herself in some danger, though, and hell, she might not inherit her great aunt’s fortune, if she doesn’t solve the mystery of her murder.

The great aunt’s murder, that is. Our heroine has never met the great aunt at the start, and never does, because she’s murdered right away. But we know from a prologue that the great aunt always expected to be murdered. A medium told her so — or at least implied as much — when she was 16. It became the defining fact of her life, which is quite sad.

The great aunt is a secondary first-person narrator, by way of her diaries. So we get alternating chapters of the past and present. It’s a good read.

I did something unusual for me at the end: I read the few pages fom the sequel that are included at the back. Usually I skip that kind of thing. Especially when it’s not from a sequel, but from another book entirely. Not this time, though, and I’ll be seeking out How to Seal Your Own Fate (‘Book two in The Castle Knoll Files’) at some point.