The short story is called Inferno, of course! In some of the book’s other short stories the reader meets the saddened musical brothers who are burying their father, the undertaker, amongst the potatoes in his kitchen garden, another musician who discovers a blank gravestone in his boxroom and last but not least, a black dog. Here we meet Strindberg sitting all alone in the canteen in IKEA in Iceland surrounded by shoppers stuffing themselves with Swedish meatballs and cowberry jam. If anyone wonders where August Strindberg ended up after his death, the answer can be found in Gyrðir Elíasson’s latest collection of short stories, Milli trjánna. Here’s a bit from Jón Yngvi Jóhannsson’s write-up of Milli trjánna: “The Icelandic author Gyrðir Elíasson has won the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2011 for his short story collection Milli trjánna for stylistically outstanding literary art which depicts inner and outer threats in dialogue with world literature.” we don’t use the word “adjudicating” near enough in our modern vernacular):
I wanted there to be more stories in which to immerse myself.As announced yesterday, Icelandic author Gyrðir Elíasson has won the 2011 Nordic Council Literature Prize for his short story collection Milli trjánna.įrom the Adjudicating Committee (! - great name. It was one of those books that I did not want to end. Each little tidbit of a story whetted my appetite all the more. 'In vivid and haunting prose, Eliasson shows how no man can be an island, as community intrudes upon their self-exile in the most unexpected ways.' As Elìasson writes, 'all dreams are joined at the edges, like the squares in a patchwork quilt.' Like the wide canopy of stars under which they're told, these stories plot a constellation of single, glittering images: a child defacing a new piano with a chisel in the middle of the night a freezer packed with carefully wrapped dead birds, candles floating in a pond at night… Elìasson's images are always unresolved, but are also somehow complete like the dreams he shares with us, that lead us, through their own solitude, into other people's. In almost every story we find people taking leave of their normal lives in order to take their dreams more seriously.īut even in the most desolate surroundings Elìasson's characters find strange company ghostly presences in the early hours, enviable neighbours, fellow writers turning up at the same retreat, with the same ambitions. We follow a Boston ornithologist, speeding through the landscape in a four-by-four, chasing Arctic Terns a schoolboy relocating to the northernmost town of Siglufjördur to compete in a chess tournament a husband packing his wife off to visit her aunt in Sweden. Situated on the lonely western shores of Iceland, or out in the vast mountain ranges or barren lava fields of this spectacular country, each one is a study in self-exile. Gyrðir Elìasson's stories take us out of ourselves.
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