101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason (translated by Brian FitzGibbon) was a chunky pocketbook of 365 pages that was alternately filled with rapid-fire dialogue and on the other hand page after page of blocks of solid text that rambled on and on about essentially nothing. All of this reflects the life and mind of Hlynur Björn, an unemployed man in his early thirties who still lives at home with his mother and does nothing but surf the Internet, smoke and watch TV all day.
The novel was written in 1996 and is full of pop culture references. I am old enough to remember what was cool thirty years ago, yet I wonder how relevant it would be to young readers of today. I have no idea what parts of the novel were not written in Icelandic, but there is some Danish in the text (which I needed Google Translate to decipher) and several passages where Hlydur reveals, loathingly, that people around him are speaking in English, obligating him to as well. I commend FitzGibbon for translating poetry into English rhymes and for retaining the Icelandic wordplay into English equivalents. There was never a moment where I felt as if I were reading a translation, and wish I had the original Icelandic to compare it to.
Passages of dialogue could go on for pages and these were quick reads. Sometimes if the dialogue was just between two people, Hallgrímur would render it all in one large chunk, with dashes separating the speakers. Representing dialogue in this fashion makes it look, as well as sound, more immediate than if it was printed in the usual format of each speaker–even if uttering only one single word–on a separate line.
After halfway through the book I grew to dislike the stream-of-consciousness solid blocks of text, where Hlynur observes, comments upon, gets distracted, and reminisces about everything yet by the end of the flow it all amounts to nothing. We are no further ahead than before he started to ramble. Hallgrímur did have a purpose in writing like this, overwrought it may be, to show how aimlessly Hlynur staggers through life. I just don’t think I needed to read 365 pages of it. It reminded me of the style of Bret Easton Ellis, and how when I read his work I turned page after page without learning more about the story or characters.
Hlynur’s constant need for stimulation is to cycle through channels with his remote control, which he treats as an adult version of a security blanket. Even when Hlynur is staying elsewhere far away from home, he misses not having his “zapper” close at hand.
For such a slacker who spends all his daylight hours indoors watching TV, surfing the Internet or recovering from hangovers, Hlynur does get around, even though he claims throughout the novel that he doesn’t have enough sex. Over the course of the story we find him in more than one paternity crisis. Sex and masturbation occupy more ink than I would care to elaborate upon, yet perhaps it is the inner prude in me that turned me into Andrea Martin’s Dr. Cheryl Kinsey every time I read about him contemplating his dick or wanting to whack off ( = all the time). Pages and pages are devoted to this guy’s dick, and I must be getting old if even I thought it was a boring read. The novel ends with him staring down at his “little man”, yet this can hardly be worthy of a spoiler alert.
His girlfriend, or ex, or the first woman he knocks up, is Hofy. A typical Hlynur remark is the way he introduces her to the reader:
“Hofy is a square with a stud in her nose. It’s a glistening plaque on a foundation stone that belies the rest of the building. Her soul is like a movie in slow motion, every time she opens her mouth you yawn.”
It is no spoiler to reveal, as it states it plainly on the back cover, that Hlynur falls in love with his mother’s lesbian lover Lolla. You can guess who the second mother-to-be is. Hlynur spends part of his time visiting a hippie mystic in an attempt to thwart these women from giving birth, and learning spells and instructions on how to keep himself childless and free from the obligations of providing child support.
The absence of chapters meant that the action wasn’t summed up into discrete slots. This was really a stream-of-consciousness story where the reader joined Hlynur as he went with the flow. As the remaining page count got smaller and smaller I wondered how Hallgrímur would compose an end to the story, and when I got to the last page I knew that this had to be it. It was an anticlimax. The story just ended with Hlynur having a conversation with his mother about her sudden ability to lactate again, to feed the baby that her lover Lolla had just given birth to. A weird conversation between a mother and son. A movie was made in 2000 based on the novel. I wonder if I should see it.