Tómas Jónsson: Metsölubók

by Guðbergur Bergsson

Þegar Tómas Jónsson Metsölubók kom út árið 1966 vakti hún strax mikið umtal, hneykslun og aðdáun og seldist upp, stóð undir nafni. Aldrei hafði áður komið út slík bók hér á landi. Elliært gamalmenni lætur dæluna ganga um allt milli himins og jarðar milli þess sem ólíkir textar af alls kyns tagi skjóta upp kollinum. Frásagnir hefjast en hætta, persónur koma og fara, renna saman og sundur í orðaflaumnum. Hæðst er að gömlum frásagnaraðferðum og höfundinum virðist ekkert heilagt.

Fyndni Guðbergs og uppátækjasemi á sér lítil takmörk. Í bókinni allri er sprengikraftur nýsköpunarinnar svo að hún nær sterkum tökum á lesanda. Flestir voru sammála um að hér væri um að ræða tímamótaverk og með árunum hefur bókin öðlast sinn sess í íslenskum bókmenntum: Tómas Jónsson, meistaraverk.

Guðmundur Andri Thorsson ritar eftirmála.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Adult Fiction, Novels

470 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Guðbergur qualified as a teacher from the Iceland University of Education in 1955, went to Spain for further studies and graduated in Spanish, Literature and Art History from the University of Barcelona in 1958. Since then he has spent much of his time in Spain.
His first books, the novel Músin sem læðist (The Mouse That Creeps) and the poetry collection Endurtekin orð (Repeated Words), appeared in 1961. Since then he has published numerous books of various kinds: short stories, over 20 novels, children's books, autobiographical novels and more. He has also written articles about literature, art, and social issues for newspapers and magazines.
Guðbergur Bergsson is one of Iceland's most prolific translators from Spanish and has thus played an important part in introducing Spanish and Latin-American authors in Iceland. His own books have been translated into several languages and the novel Svanurinn (The Swan) has received critical acclaim in many countries. Guðbergur received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy in 2004.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beguiling and baffling Icelandic monolith from the peak of the postmodern era (the 1960s). The Ulysses comparisons are tantalising, as are the cover-blurb descriptors ‘Rabelaisian’ and ‘picaresque’, however, this is a work more embedded in cultural, nationalistic and folkloric notions of nation than a naughty romp of staggering formal innovation. The novel presents a series of fractured notebooks from the titular bestseller, a man with senile dementia whose writings are erratic, nonsensical, and borderline bats. Some last several pages, others spool into thirty or more, and each unleash various torrents of mental catarrh in typographically diverse forms: s-o-c patches, untabulated paragraphs, italicised stories, accounts from the narrator’s nursing home present, his past, old mythical tales (real or invented?), and huge thickets of unclassifiable and illogical prose, captivating in its nordic weirdery. A true understanding of Icelandic history, its myths, culture (Laxness is blasted on several occasions), and the sixties zeitgeist is probably required for a full understanding of this densely referential novel. The prose, translated into stylish English by poet Lytton Smith, has a majestic weave, and each notebook unleashes a spume of challenging, fascinating, hilarious, disturbing, and headscratching digressions, making the novel an essential read for anyone interested in exploratory and original writing from anywhere outside their own backyard. An EVENT, this novel, dammit!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Perhaps everything pub'd by Open Letter is worth your while. This one is.

Imagine if something like this wins the btba.

Imagine if something like this actually threatened the bestseller list.

Imagine if you had to make up your own mind about this one rather than the latest gone girl.

"the-xyz-ulysses" ; I will second that motion. The world needs more ulyssi.

see MJ's blurb=job above.

[João Reis · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller", by Guðbergur Bergsson
An entertaining romp that takes the form of a fragmented and plot-deprived book of memoirs depicting the (almost) uneventful life of Tómas Jónsson, a now senile retired bank clerk and an awful human being. Bergsson's attacks on Icelandic literature and culture - Laxness included - are particularly on-spot and amusing, and the novel is quite funny in some parts.
Alas, though Bergsson is somehow capable of drawing the reader's attention to his experimental prose (think: late 60's post-modernism), the book often gets a bit out of track with its many cryptic passages. The last 50 pages are practically unintelligible.
Lytton Smith's translation is terrific and the result of a tremendous amount of hard work.

[Icíar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Le he pesto dos estrellas, aunque soy consciente de que pudiera merecer más. Es un libro curioso, utiliza el lenguaje de forma ingeniosa. Me ha pasado lo mismo que a uno de los grandes como Samuel Beckett, que con todo ese lenguaje intimista, de cómo los pensamientos van y vienen por la mente de una persona, del absurdo, pues me agota. Lo dejo aparcado para otro momento que tenga más paciencia.
El género del absurdo no debe de ser lo mío.
Lo dejé en la página 72.

[Yossi]

Una locura, un caos con destellos brillantes, un personaje inolvidable, grotesco y capaz de despertar algo parecido a la ternura en ocasiones, un libro inteligente que descarto para puntuación aunque no para relectura.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to like this more but by the end was thoroughly confused. Tomas was called Hermann plus multiple Tomas(es). Not sure if its the translation or Icelandic tradition but in some scenes a character's pronoun would switch genders. Not really my cup of tea

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable in short snatches, I was unable to grasp the greater good. Probably my error in reaching for what wasn't there and thus missing more of what was. Even a perfect imitation of bad writing becomes indistinguishable from its target. But at the same time an intricate joke is lost on an impatient reader.

[Jordi Via · Rating 3 out of 5]

Le pondría tres estrellas y media, pero no es posible.
Lo he disfrutado, he tomado muchas notas.
Lo mejor es perderse entre sus páginas sin más.

[Vel Veeter]

So I recently received a subscription to “Open Letter” books as a gift. Their premise is translating and publishing a variety of texts from locally well-known writers and helping bring them to the English speaking reading world.

This book was initially published in the mid-1960s, and has not been translated into English before, as far as I can tell. The whole book is the product of a narrator writing a book, but also resisting the idea of writing a book. It’s incredibly fractured as a reading experience, contains lots of “extra-text” such as editor commentary, annotations, and rehashing of previous material. There’s not an explicit narrative as far as I could make out. The narrator is an older, senile man of indeterminate age. He casts himself as the age of the century itself, which would put him in his earlier 60s, but his general unreliability, the possibility that he’s a fabrication, and other factors suggest that could be wrong. He rails. He rails against anything and everything he can think of. He has very strong opinions about sick leave at work, crossing national border, his penis, women, using the bathroom, and especially writing.

He hates Haldor Laxness, with a great and terrible vengeance. I don’t know much about Halldow Laxness, but he won the Nobel Prize (Iceland’s only) previous to this novel and like a number of winners, his win was seen as a way to shed light on the quality and nature of Icelandic literature. But like any literature, no single author, no single work, can stand in for a diverse, even if small culture. And so the mission of this novel, at least as far as the narrator is concerned is call bullshit on this.

If Laxness is the writer of a national ethos, of the contents of daily struggle, of sheep, of the people, then Tomas Jonsson will take a big old dump on all of that and show them. In the same way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was trying to resist becoming the mouthpiece of South American literature (and accidentally did through this act of resistance), this novel attempts to disrupt all sense of unity and cohesion.

It’s a tough novel to read. It’s often quite funny, but so much of it feels like disconnected rants, disconnected vignettes, and digressions, it’s frustrating and tiresome. This was not fun to read, but I am glad I have read it. It’s been called Iceland’s Ulysses and maybe it is, and maybe all it’s done for me is get me ready to read Ulysses (coming to you in CBR 10).

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

stranger than Palinuro Of Mexico... a slow read.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esteemed as, the back cover of the Open Letter will have you know, the "Icelandic ULYSSES," Guðbergur Bergsson's TÓMAS JÓNSSON, BESTSELLER definitely strikes me as splitting the difference between James Joyce and his slaying-the-father quasi-protégé Samuel Beckett. As in the Joyce of ULYSSES we have a densely variegated, teeming litany of literary games and approaches (the novel as whole, big, diverse world, radically unto itself). As in Becket (especially the novels) we have a pretty-darned-mad narrator whose obsessive musings and digressions speak to a contained consciousness that contains a great deal indeed. (Even when Beckett isn't writing from the inside of one consciousness, he always presents us w/ figures desperately locked-up in their own experience of alienated cogitation.) The tendency might be to declare Beckett the minimalist to Joyce's maximalist, but I would hold that Beckett (especially, again, as a novelist) is just a different, more streamlined kind of maximalist. I thought of Beckett's MOLLOY at least as often as I thought of ULYSSES whilst reading TÓMAS JÓNSSON. Think of the complex comic logic of Molloy's circulation of sucking-rocks in his various pockets (what Deleuze and Guattari call the "rock-sucking machine"). It is passages such as this one that Beckett demonstrates a connection to 'pataphysics w/ its elaborate and self-consistent theories born of something like nonsense. TÓMAS JÓNSSON likewise contains a lot of righteous comic nonsense, often w/ attendant theorizings. The novel also made me think of Beckett's play KRAPP'S LAST TAPE. Whereas Krapp manipulates a number of tapes made over time in a fundamentally asynchronous fashion, TÓMAS JÓNSSON, BESTSELLER takes the form of a number of "workbooks" that have been kept by their eponymous author over time, and which likewise appear to be presented to us out of sequence. What brings Bergsson closer to Joyce, however, is the panoply of formal regimes, modes of stylistic experiment, and thunderous volubility. Sometimes the prose is something like conventional, sometimes it collapses all known rules of punctuation or abandons it all together, sometimes it even reverts to poetry. The novel is notable for its delicious and childlike scatology. Lots of farts, belches, and the pissing of pants. Often I imagine translation as an exhausting and demanding undertaking, but reading TÓMAS JÓNSSON, I often thought how much fun the job of translating it must have been for Lytton Smith. Thought this strikes me as the kind of book (of which ULYSSES may well be the towering example) that may very frequently go unfinished by baffled readers, I thought it was a disorienting, raucous hoot. You sort of have to just go w/ it. Not everything will be categorically assimilated.

[Thordur · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tómas Jónsson Metsölubók var gefin út fyrir meira en hálfri öld síðan. Þegar það þótti geggjað að vera hippi og vera frjálslegur. Þessi bók er líka einkar frjálsleg og án línulegrar frásagnar. Það er talað í fyrstu persónu og þriðju og sveiflast þar á milli. Það er samt ekki formið sem er aðalmálið heldur einhvers konar tilfinning fyrir því hverju sé verið að varpa fram. Og þetta er torræð bók.

Þetta er með óskiljanlegustu bókum sem hægt er að lesa. Það tók mig mikið meira en ár að klára þetta. Í dag væri býsna erfitt að ætla sér að gefa út bók með þessu formi. Þar sem að t.d. reglur um punkta, kommur, eða hvar stór stafur ætti í raun að vera er ekki endilega á boðstólum. Þar sem að þú nær að lesa heilan kafla en ert engu nær um það hvað þú hafir í rauninni verið að lesa. Bókin minnir því klárlega á Ódysseif eftir Joyce. Mörgum hefur reynst erfitt að klára hana líka enda frásagnarmátinn flókinn og torræður.

[Bob Lopez]

The wrong book at the wrong time: this was the 3rd(?) senile and/or slowly going mad narrator I’ve read this year and nah. I made it 150 pages and was gonna push for 200 but was dreading my reading time—a bad sign. DNF.

[Timbo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. It has all the elements of a work I like: experimentation, creative license, humor, cultural specificity and universal appeal. I just couldn't ever like the narrator or the people around him, and sometimes that's enough to sour a book for me.

[Björn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely peek under the facade of appearances.

[Ferris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not at all engaged by the minutiae of this oddball memoir.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very unique story and narrative structure. Superb translation.

[Santiago López Moskovits · Rating 1 out of 5]

My sad, simple truth is that Bergsson just does not have the talent to pull off what he wants to do. I just hope that when writing this he had fun.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guðbergur Bergsson er bestur!

[Kaija · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an absolute trip, but in the most classical-literary way I could ever imagine. Ulysses-meets-Memento-meets-painfully-adult-version-of-Diary-of-a-Wimpy-Kid (approximately).

[Katy]

I received my copy free through Goodreads Firstreads

[A L]

An old bourgeois dude appeases the free market with a memoir made of a Kathy Acker-style mashing of notebooks, journals, and little stories. Really picked up after the halfway mark.

[Lori]

Got 54 pages in before the incoherent rambling became intolerable.