101 REYKJAVIK

An award-winning Icelandic novelist makes his English-language debut with a kind of Arctic Bright Lights, Big City, following the nocturnal misadventures of an overgrown baby who refuses to grow up.

As depicted here, the better part of Iceland’s populace are either writers or drunks. Our antihero Hlynur Bjorn drinks a fair amount every night himself and is always working Shakespearean quotes into his conversation. Thirty-three-year-old Hlynur still lives with his mother and is happily unemployed. He usually gets up shortly before Mom comes home from work, browses the bookstores, and spends the evenings in Reykjavik nightclubs with his pals Throstur and Guildy. Most nights Hlynur finds someone to have sex with, but he doesn’t have a steady girlfriend and is in no rush to find one. Iceland is a pretty broadminded place, sexually speaking (when Hlynur’s lesbian mother came out of the closet all he had to say was “cool”), so it’s easy not to commit. But several unexpected events complicate this happy routine. First, Hlynur falls for Mom’s girlfriend Lolla. Second, a woman Hlynur slept with a couple of times turns up pregnant with his child and decides to have the baby. Third, Guildy is diagnosed with AIDS. And fourth (this is a little while later), Lolla turns out to be pregnant by Hlynur as well. There are a lot of additional minor crises (e.g., Hlynur’s drunkard father falls off the wagon), but they go by the wayside once everyone starts getting pregnant. Hlynur tries his best to keep to his schedule of books, booze, porn, and sex, but suddenly he finds himself faced with emotional crises of a magnitude for which he is wholly unprepared. Is he actually going to get serious and decide what he wants from life? We all have to, sooner or later—even in Iceland.

Uproarious, sharp, and outrageously funny joyride with plenty of octane, though it doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.