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readingwithkt's review
2.0
My partner and I read this collection aloud to one another over a period of 14 months. In itself, that was a lovely experience, however the stories we were reading were not great and we frequently were left a little baffled or bemused about what we had just read. In the end, I set us the goal to finish the collection by the end of 2020, so here we are on the 30th doing just that.
I asked my partner how he would of review the collection and he said:
- Having lived in Iceland, with a bit of a grasp of the language, you can understand how a lot of the translations don’t flow into English quite well.
- Some stories, the plots were poorly constructed. For every one you enjoyed, you had to go through about 10 that were pretty poor.
I would agree with this. The collection seems to centre on the idea that in each story, something happens out of the blue. I honestly don’t think this is a necessary theme, as the collection would be all the richer had it simply been a collection of Icelandic authors writing in their preferred genre. However, it is what it is, and what it is just didn’t work for me or my partner.
There were still golden nuggets in the collection. Hence, I’m still glad I read Out of the Blue as it highlighted a new translator whose work I will be looking out for: Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell. It was also cool to see Meg Matich translating pieces for this, one of which (by Jón Kalman Stefánsson) might have been my favourite piece in the collection. Meg Matich held the same role that I did at a travel company in Iceland and though we have never met, it is thanks to her that we learned about the company culture etc, so I’m glad to see her career moving on and her translations being published.
I’m keen to seek out more writing from Jón Kalman Stefánsson, whose piece in this collection reminded me, in tone, of the novel LoveStar by Andri Snaer Magnusson (which I highly recommend).
As we went through, I tabbed any stories that I thought interesting, either in subject matter or writing style. Here’s that in list form:
- Escape for Men by Gerdur Kristny (tr. Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell)
- One Hundred Fifty Square Meters by Kristín Eiríksdóttir (tr. Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell)
- The Black Dog by Gyrdir Elíasson (tr. Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell)
- Three Parables by Magnús Sigurdsson (tr. Magnús Sigurdsson)
- Harmonica Sonata in C Major by Gudmundur Andri Thorsson (tr. Meg Matich)
- The Universe and the Deep Velvet Dress by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (tr. Meg Matich).
Apologies, I don’t have access to an Icelandic keyboard as I type this so some names have been presented with English characters in place of Icelandic characters.
CWs (not an exhaustive list): drowning, death of a child, suicide, murder, violence, infidelity.
I asked my partner how he would of review the collection and he said:
- Having lived in Iceland, with a bit of a grasp of the language, you can understand how a lot of the translations don’t flow into English quite well.
- Some stories, the plots were poorly constructed. For every one you enjoyed, you had to go through about 10 that were pretty poor.
I would agree with this. The collection seems to centre on the idea that in each story, something happens out of the blue. I honestly don’t think this is a necessary theme, as the collection would be all the richer had it simply been a collection of Icelandic authors writing in their preferred genre. However, it is what it is, and what it is just didn’t work for me or my partner.
There were still golden nuggets in the collection. Hence, I’m still glad I read Out of the Blue as it highlighted a new translator whose work I will be looking out for: Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell. It was also cool to see Meg Matich translating pieces for this, one of which (by Jón Kalman Stefánsson) might have been my favourite piece in the collection. Meg Matich held the same role that I did at a travel company in Iceland and though we have never met, it is thanks to her that we learned about the company culture etc, so I’m glad to see her career moving on and her translations being published.
I’m keen to seek out more writing from Jón Kalman Stefánsson, whose piece in this collection reminded me, in tone, of the novel LoveStar by Andri Snaer Magnusson (which I highly recommend).
As we went through, I tabbed any stories that I thought interesting, either in subject matter or writing style. Here’s that in list form:
- Escape for Men by Gerdur Kristny (tr. Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell)
- One Hundred Fifty Square Meters by Kristín Eiríksdóttir (tr. Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell)
- The Black Dog by Gyrdir Elíasson (tr. Sola Bjarnadóttir O’Connell)
- Three Parables by Magnús Sigurdsson (tr. Magnús Sigurdsson)
- Harmonica Sonata in C Major by Gudmundur Andri Thorsson (tr. Meg Matich)
- The Universe and the Deep Velvet Dress by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (tr. Meg Matich).
Apologies, I don’t have access to an Icelandic keyboard as I type this so some names have been presented with English characters in place of Icelandic characters.
CWs (not an exhaustive list): drowning, death of a child, suicide, murder, violence, infidelity.
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