I've taken an interest to Iceland ever since I read Halldór Laxness. Seeing there are a few Icelandic authors in translation - or maybe they are indeed just a few - I wanted to explore this country through the detective novels of Arnaldur Indriðason, as well. Luckily, he gives some interesting insights into the social aspect of Icelandic people. Well, more like the criminality aspect, through phrases such as:Icelandic murders aren't complicated.Icelandic judges were notoriously lenient.Icelandic murderers generally don’t leave anything behind but a mess.My Gr friend Linda has been to Iceland and she told me that this is considered one of the safest countries in the world. This baffled me, so I've read more about it and came upon an interesting BBC article: an US law student went to Iceland to study the reason behind the low criminality rate. In a country where almost one person out of three owns a gun, the few crimes that occur don't usually involve firearms. Hmm, strange. Give one angry American a gun and he'll know what to do with it! Even Police members are unarmed, the only officers permitted to carry firearms are on a special force called the Viking Squad, and they are seldom called out.I'm really fascinated now. [In Iceland]...violent crime was virtually non-existent. People seemed relaxed about their safety and that of their children to the point where parents left their babies outside and unattended. This reminded me of the Beaumont children cold case in Australia, which greatly influenced Australian society in that a lot of people who left their children unattended, believing their country was safe, improved their supervision. I hope this never happens in Iceland, which should remain like it is, a happy and miraculous exception. But what are the reasons behind this amazing fact? It seems that Iceland's social welfare and education systems promote an egalitarian culture and there is virtually no difference among upper, middle and lower classes. It looks like Icelandic people managed to put in practice the teachings of Prophet Mani.A study of the Icelandic class system done by a University of Missouri master's student found only 1.1% of participants identified themselves as upper class, while 1.5% saw themselves as lower class. The remaining 97% identified themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class. On another web-site, the question "How Safe is Reykjavik, Iceland?" is answered with Crime in Reykjavik is basically non-existent, even petty thieves are only rarely seen. The only area in Reykjavik that a single female may not want to visit late at night is Austurvöllur Park - and that's only because it's a popular place for winos, who like to keep to themselves anyway. Ha ha, not even wankers or exhibitionists - I guess it's too cold for that! I'm sorry this is not actually a review, but I've found all this information fascinating and I wanted to share it with you. Inspector Erlendur deals with a crime that defies the Icelandic tradition, in that it's not simple and careless, but puzzling and brain-racking. The criminal leaves a note behind (we don't find out what it says until the middle of the book). Were it not for the presence of another layer to the story - about the detective's personal life - this novel would get 4 stars from me. It was much better than Silence of the Grave, because it dealt more with the actual investigation (which was also much more interesting) and less with domestic drama. The atmosphere is bleak, it rains without ever seeming to stop, and Erlendur has family issues, mainly with his daughter, who is a drug addict. Reading the novel, I've got under the impression that there is a serious issue with drugs in Iceland, but further info showed that it is not the case. I guess Indriðason wanted to place his inspector in the worst living conditions, which seems to me a bit too forced. In Silence of the Grave we find out about more tragedies in his life, which makes me wonder if every book in the series brings additional misfortune to Erlendur, poor man. Two other interesting facts in the novel:1. Icelanders eat boiled sheep's head, which I find to be gross. I won't post a picture, no, no. It is a traditional dish called Svið, which originated in harsh times when people started to use every part of a slaughtered animal. Here's a funny account of eating such dish:Never did I expect to taste such a barbaric dish as a sheep's head. But a decade later there it was on my plate, looking up at me with a sorrowful glaze in its eyes. I pulled the jaw apart and stabbed a clump of meat with my fork. When in Iceland... And it wasn't bad. Really. The cheek, where most of the meat is found, was tender and rather tasty. Dipped in a little rhubarb jelly, it was even better. Just beware of the eyes. Those baby blues are considered a delicacy. Well, really, it's the entire eye socket that some Icelanders find so appetizing, with or without the actual eyeball included. So plop that hunk of meat into your mouth and try to think about something else. Anything else. - Lara Weber, Chicago Tribune 2. Indriðason talks in his novel about a Genetic Research Centre, which actually has a base in reality. In such a centre would be gathered medical data about all the Icelanders, linked with a genealogy database in which the family of every single Icelander would be traced back to the Middle Ages.They called it establishing the Icelandic genetic pool. The main aim was to discover how hereditary illnesses were transmitted, study them genetically and find ways to cure them, and other diseases if possible. It was said that the homogenous nation and lack of miscegenation made Iceland a living laboratory for genetic research. - Arnaldur Indriðason
أنا مهما قريت في أنواع مختلفة من الأدب، هيفضل الأدب البوليسي والتشويقي عشقي الأول النوع دة من الأدب بيتطلب موهبة تانية مع الكتابة، ازاي القارىء يمسك الرواية ويبقى هيموت عشان يخلصها، أي تفصيلة صغيرة القارىء مركز معاها، ومستني يبقى ليها دور في الكشف عن اللغز والغموض المحيط بجريمة القتل الرواية بتحكي عن جريمة قتل ضحيتها رجل في التاسعة والستين من عمره، القاتل ترك خلفه ورقة كتب عليها بالقلم الرصاص "أنا هو"، ودة الخيط الوحيد الذي تملكه الشرطة بيبدأ المحقق في البحث عن خلفيات القتيل، بيكتشف إن كانت سمعته سيئة جدا، واتهم منذ أربعين سنة بجريمة اغتصاب وتم تبرئته منها، المرأة التي اغتصبها حملت ولم تجهض الجنين، أنجبت فتاة جميلة، ولكن للأسف الشديد توفيت الفتاة بعد أربع سنوات، اكتأبت الوالدة بعد وفاة ابنتها وانتحرت بعد ثلاث سنوات من هنا بيبدأ المفتش في إمساك الخيوط وتجميع قطع الأحجية حتى نعرف ما الذي حدث للرجل العجوز ولماذا من أحلى الحاجات في الرواية إن الكاتب خرج عن المألوف في قصة الحب، لم يضع امرأة جميلة يقع المحقق في غرامها، أو علاقة حب قديمة بتعود للظهور على السطح، اللي عمله الكاتب هو التحدث عن علاقة المحقق المتوترة بإبنته التي تعاني من الإدمان، أد ايه بيحبها ومش قادر يفرض عليها حاجة، وأد ايه يتمنى إنها تعيش معا حياة طبيعية، كانت فكرة رائعة وفي غاية الإمتاع والواقعيةأنصح بقراءتها لمحبي الأدب البوليسي والغير بوليسي على السواء، لأن ليها جانب اجتماعي جميل
What do You think about Jar City (2005)?
Scandinavian Noir, heavy on the noir, which I enjoyed enough to just zip through. The only negative to this is the Icelandic names. I can only say that for that reason, this would never be a read aloud. The detective, Erlendur, is a seasoned veteran. I'd like to describe him as sort of frumpy, but I learned that term applies to a woman. Anyway, at one point it was noticed that he'd buttoned his sweater wrong so that the bottom button didn't have a buttonhole to match. And late in the book, he was noticed to have changed his clothes and that they looked almost ironed. So very different from Christie's Poirot who had to have the size of the eggs match and was always making certain his mustache was perfect. I like them both and will be happy to again meet Erlandur.
—Elizabeth (Alaska)
This is an intriguing novel, atmospherically and in its inexplicable ability to sustain the reader's interest -- despite the fact that practically everyone in it is strange, idiopathic, stilted or weird of articulation, practically autistically disconnected from reality, and committed to viewing everything generically and without depth or dimension, as though through the filter of a bad fifties cop drama. Dragnet, possibly, though without the cheeriness and empathy of Joe Friday.Erlendur, the protagonist, is a weary, bleak, generally enervated and ineffectual police inspector wIth the emotional IQ of a dysfunctional gibbon, who always, always says and does the wrong thing in any situation in which ordinary human sensitivity is demanded. He's not remotely stupid, and he solves a complex case that calls into question issues ranging from misogynistic practices in the treatment of rape cases to the questionable ethics of the virtual "jar cities" of genetic databases, but in so doing, he ignores the obvious, passively abuses practically everyone around him with an aggressive indifference, fails to prioritize his daughter's life or his own health -- or anything that matters, really -- over the dreary details of a disproportionately comprehensive investigation, and ends by precipitating the suicide of the hapless and essentially innocent perpetrator of the original crime. And yet the story somehow gains ever more traction, and Erlendur ever greater approximation of minimal human warmth, as matters progress from parental neglect to abuse of witnesses to desecration of a child's grave to the perfectly foreseeable fatal ineffectuality of Erlendur's final attempt to avert Einar's suicide. In the dénouement, Erlendur sits with the drug-addicted, pregnant daughter he'd earlier left to the streets, eating the meat stew she's prepared and inexplicably sensitively suggesting that she name her daughter after the lost child who's the central victim of the whole drama.Throughout, all the characters remark on how Icelandic everything is. Can you imagine saying not, "this is a typically clumsy murder," but "this is a typically clumsy, American murder?" Or it's just so American, the rainy weather today? Or I'd better take an American drive to the American supermarket? Is it a bad translation, or does the author think that everyone in Iceland is just unremittingly conscious of how Icelandic he or she is, and feels called upon constantly to remark on it? This sort of awkward, completely supererogatory, once-distanced observation goes on constantly, is committed by everybody, and gives rise to the sense that all the characters really do think they are cardboard cutouts in a minimalist screenplay by Lars Von Trier.And yet somehow it works, and it's even emotionally and intellectually satisfying. There's just no accounting for some Nordic novels.
—Mark
المتابع لأدب (الجريمه) من المؤكد انه سيلاحظ تطور ملموس بشدة .من دويل لأجاثا كريستى الى الطفرة الرهيبه فى العقود الأخيرة .والفرق شاسع فعلا تبعا للتطور الرهيب فى الوسائل المعيشيه المختلفه.ورغم كلاسيكة (أجاثا) التى لا تقاوم وعبقريتها الفذه الا اننا لا نقدر أن ننكر ابداع أدب الجريمهالحديث الذى كاد أن يزحزح كريستى من على عرشها (دان براون كمثال).المهم أننا فى هذا العمل أمام ادب جريمه من الطراز الرفيع.جريمة ما فى ايسلندا تتعمق وتتشعب بطريقه مذهله.تطور أدب الجريمه لم يكن فقط فى الأدوات الحديثه ولا التطور المعيشى بل طال التطور (تحديث للغه والتعمق فى النفوس الروائيه المختلفه)اللغه رغم انها مترجمه الا انها مبدعه وبسيطه وسهله.الأحداث متسلسله بصورة سلسة وبسيطه.الوصف كافى جدا ويقدم المطلوب الشخصيات مؤثرة جدا ومتطورة فى حد ذاتها.لم يخلو العمل من ثوابت أدب الجريمه من تشويق واثارة ومفاجأة بل كان متميز جدا فيها
—Ahmed
