The World's Literature in Europe discussion

The short story collection Stone Tree

A blog review of Stone Tree picks out some of its stories and some of its author's literary characteristics. I noticed that Gyrðir Elíasson wrote other stories as well, 'House No. 451' and 'Inferno', and that Words without Borders has them.

Don wrote: "... It sounds like some of these stories might hit uncomfortably close to home for at least one of us: "the obsessive bibliophile..."

Books figure in many of the stories, at least the main character is always reading and his books cover subjects from ornithology to biographies and literature. Interesting real-life info the author introduces, too, corroborated by books.

Don wrote: "I've read the first two stories, twice each now. This is really the kind of writing that bears close scrutiny."

Like yourself, Don, I'm reading each story twice, mostly because they are resonating with echoes, with allusions to something unspoken about the main character. I'm liking the stories because nothing horrible happens, so far, even with the second thoughts from those allusions.

What I find with him as a writer is that every word counts. He speaks in imagery a lot of times, and I have even resorted to looking up what some of the images mean in folklore, etc. When I first read Stone Tree, I had the strong feeling that although they are short stories, they were all somehow inter-related. I still thinkn that. There are common themes. I have read another collection translated into French now, and have been able to find one story in its original Icelandic. I wish there was more translated into English!

Judy wrote: "What I find with him as a writer is that every word counts. He speaks in imagery a lot of times, and I have even resorted to looking up what some of the images mean in folklore, etc..."

Looking up the folklore behind the images, Judy, is marvelous. Probably, something interesting turned up.

Today, I noted his impressionistic sequences. A situation he's in will remind him of something else and that something opens up to an otherwise unrelated image except in its relation to his experiences.

Finishing the chapter, 'The Bird Painter from Boston', I wondered about a book on the topic of Iceland's birds. These were the first titles I came across:

Iceland Summer: Adventures of a Bird Painter

"Doc and his friend Sewall Pettingill, along with Sewall’s wife, Eleanor, spent the summer of 1958 in Iceland. It was a grand adventure that resulted in Doc’s book Iceland Summer. One of the paintings Doc created, of a Gyrfalcon on a ledge, was used in preparing an Icelandic postage stamp. For his book and artwork focusing on Iceland, George Miksch Sutton became "Sir George Miksch Sutton" when he was awarded the Knight Cross Order of the Falcon by the Icelandic government in 1972." http://www.suttoncenter.org/pages/the...

Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World

Don wrote: "Is it just me, or do characters in these stories seem to lack emotion? Maybe its part of the Icelandic tradition where the sagas didn't talk at all about inner feelings, but it kind of comes acros..."

And, the dialogue between characters is fragmented, sometimes mumbled as in "Berry Juice". Regarding that story of his emotionlessly encountering his associate bookseller's death, the m.c. also calmly acts before an axe-wielding, eyeless vision, as the m.c. continues his normal routine. In "Watershed", a couple's break up is described through the man's binoculars when the woman and son apparently drive away from a tourist site while the man rejuvenates a youthful ambition on a solitary seaside hike. Plain answers to the suspense are left unknown to chance as the confident man proceeds along the promontory. In "The Carpentry Workshop", a boy turns away from a carpenter's career when his carpenter father could not build a stairway to heaven with wood and nails. The boy turns that would-be surreal object into metaphor when he aims to build the stairway with language, however imperfect the effort might turn out. The boy's emotion for his deceased sister is transmuted to description and imagery. So far, I think, none of the characters have poured out their intangible grief, fear, or joy, though tangible physical pain from an unexpected dog bite is borne with some discomfort in "The Lost Grimms' Fairytale".

Don wrote: "I was starting to think the collection was about Asperger's until that story. The way I read it, the narrator's strong reaction to the death of his sister..."

In the last story, 'Summerbook', the best in this memorable collection imho, Elíasson brings back the word-building imagery for making something tangible and more real from its multitude of units, in a previous story having envisioned a celestial stairway of words to his dead sister.

"He began to write, as if laying a pavement with tiny mosaic tiles; painstakingly building up, word by word, his account..."

On the lonely, dark-shingled Icelandic seashore, the m.c. John Sears spends the summer in a decrepit seashore dwelling turning away from imaginary fiction writing to nonfiction, producing by autumn his version of perhaps Thoreau's , as that New England transcendentalist is referred to during the story:

"The writer had arranged all his notebooks neatly in the top of the wooden crate. It no longer reminded him of a coffin, but of one of those containers for nourishing life in plants and seedlings."

The m.c.'s penchant for writing vis-à-vis nature led me to the new Dover edition of
Speaking for Nature: The Literary Naturalists, from Transcendentalism to the Birth of the American Environmental Movement (2014).