Review: 101 Reykjavik By Hallgrimur Helgason Essay, Research Paper

A foal and three vets101 Reykjavik

by Hallgrimur Helgason

384pp, FaberThe oddball narrator of Icelander Helgason’s novel is depressed. You can’t blame him. Thirty-three and terminally unemployed, Hlynur still lives at home with his divorced mother, who has just announced that she is gay. To complicate matters, he is crazy about his mother’s new lesbian lover, Lolla. Meanwhile, Hofy, the dreary girl he has slept with once or twice, has just told him that she is pregnant. When the drunken Lolla accidentally has sex with him on the living-room floor – her orgasm memorably compared to “a foal being held down by three vets for an injection” – it is hardly surprising that our hero’s sense of sexual identity is further befuddled. “Is that your girlfriend?” enquires a friend. “No,” he replies dolefully. “It’s my new stepfather.” The 1990s gave us a plethora of novels about disaffected, unemployed urban young men who spent a lot of time thinking about scoring (sex or drugs) and whose aimlessly uneventful lives we were supposed to find cool or funny or both. Well, fortunately, Helgason’s deeply entertaining zip through aimless, disaffected angst is nothing like them. It goes almost nowhere, but it is a total, laugh-a-minute joy to read. First of all, this lusciously deadpan narrative – dazzlingly translated by Brian Fitzgibbon – is more than funny. It is not so much peppered with gags as infused with a wild, anarchic take on the world that is caustically, worryingly truthful. Hlynur speaks as most of us think. Though doubtless infuriating to be with, he has an imagination, a wit and a fantasy life that are genuinely engaging. His sudden pronouncements, his oddball non sequiturs, his louche flights of fantasy are all intelligent, unexpected and beguiling. A warning, though. The effect is cumulative – sneakily so. Resist the urge to read bits aloud (as I did) to any poor victim who walks into the room – they may not get it. It is hard to explain why comparing Hlynur rolling on a condom with “an air hostess standing in the aisles, demonstrating the use of a life jacket” is side-splittingly funny. You just have to read it.And OK, none of the territory is exactly new or original, and in the end our hero’s journey kind of peters out. But what this writer is doing – being current, being new, shaking up notions of literariness with naughty terrier teeth – is something I so admire. He has done the best thing possible: found a new way of telling. It is a kind of pop prose which looks easy, but is far from it. When he begins a scene with “Living room. Four metres from the window, then three millimetres of jean fabric, then Lolla,” you’re right bang there.Fun, quick, effortlessly descriptive. And dead simple, surely? Yes – if you have the energy and gumption to think of it.· Julie Myerson’s most recent novel is Laura Blundy (Fourth Estate)