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Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

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1 of 1 copy available

“Guðbergur Bergsson achieved success with his novel Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, which shocked Icelandic readers in innumerable ways, lashing out as it does at the Icelandic society of the post-war years for its cultural confusion, amorality, and hypocrisy. The main character is a grumpy old man who speaks and writes in various styles, grumbles and babbles and criticizes everything."—Dagný Kristjánsdóttir

A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, Tómas Jónsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he's going to write his own—a sure bestseller—that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, Tómas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir—something that's as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published.

Considered by many to be the 'Icelandic Ulysses' for its wordplay, neologisms, structural upheaval, and reinvention of what's possible in Icelandic writing, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller was a bestseller, heralding a new age of Icelandic literature.

Guðbergur Bergsson is the author of twenty-one books, from novels to children's literature, and a translator from Spanish into Icelandic. He has received the Icelandic Literary Prize and the Nordic Prize.

Lytton Smith is the author of The All-Purpose Magical Tent, and has translated works from Bragi Ólafsson, Jón Gnarr, and Kristin Ómarsdóttir, among others.

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    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2017
      A modernist classic from Iceland, half a century old, makes its first appearance in the U.S.He's a mean man, a sick man. And, though "descended from the bravest, bluest-eyed Vikings," Tomas Jonsson doesn't strike much of a heroic figure; old and fast falling apart, hidden away in a basement flat, he spends his time filling the pages of composition books with reflections, sometimes aphoristic and sometimes stream-of-consciousness floods, on the things he has seen and done. "I am completely bound to the passing moment," he records. "I am the passing moment. I am time itself. I have no remarkable experiences. I have no spare moments from the past." Ordinary though his experiences may have been in the larger human story, they're enough to sustain an off-kilter, often dyspeptic worldview. First published in 1966, a decade after Halldor Laxness became the first and so far only Icelandic writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Bergsson's novel has a Joycean quality to it, Finnegans Wake as much as Ulysses, with portraits of the artist as a man at various stages of life, all of them querulous. Jonsson frets that he cannot be a real writer because he lacks a callused pen finger, and that's only the first of his strict attentions to the body and its functions, as when Bergsson via Jonsson describes a woman eating a boardinghouse meal even as other diners "de-wind themselves with a couple of farts": "She put it in her mouth on the tines of her fork, her jaws swinging to and fro, bjabb-bjabb, as the steak mashes down her esophagus down to the stomach grog-grog." It's not the most appetizing of visions, but Bergsson's shaggy (and, in a couple of instances, carefully shaven) dog stories have a certain weird charm, even as it develops that Jonsson has discovered one great raison d'etre for writing a memoir: revenge. Nothing much happens on the surface of Bergsson's yarn, but underneath there's plenty of magma bubbling.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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