Getting a Read: Öræfi: The Wasteland
Öræfi: The Wasteland by Ófeigur Sigurðsson
It’s my firm belief that when a person recommends a book to me, they’re handing me an inside look at their soul. In this series, “Getting a Read,” I try to uncover truth about books and their recommenders.
THE RECOMMENDER
Jeremiah Johnson, my brother, and the most likely person in my life to hand me a new book. This week’s read, handed to me many months ago with a look of shock as he closed the book for the last time himself, is Öræfi: The Wasteland by Ófeigur Sigurðsson.
HOW TO READ IT
In the winter, with a St. Bernard pup curled up by your feet, so when you get lost in the glacier that is this book, you know your rescuer is already at hand. Brandy optional, but you will definitely want a blanket.
REVIEW: Öræfi: The Wasteland by Ófeigur Sigurðsson
Iceland’s been a dream vacation of mine since before Iceland was everybody’s dream vacation. When Jer handed me this book, I was excited to jump into it, hoping for a taste of the gorgeous country I’m still looking forward to visiting.
If you allow yourself to fall into this book, it will feel like a fever dream. For some, such a leap might take as dramatic a movement as the main character’s devastating fall into Öræfi’s crevasse. This is not a book for the faint-of-literary-heart.
Ultimately this book is one man’s quest to recover and record memory. It tracks a main character by way of the author in a layered manner. Claire Pincumbe calls this book “A delightfully complex play on the epistolary novel” and the proof is in the pudding-cum-narrative-structure. The author receives a set of pages from a guy he met on the road who tells a story that he sometimes writes but which is also sometimes narrated by the veterinarian who castrated him who sometimes allows her translator to transcribe for her and occasionally he lets the narrative responsibilities go to people he meets along the way as well. If you had trouble following that sentence, don’t worry, so did I, but it’s nothing compared to following this story. The narrative structure in this book is, to put it bluntly, a--fantastic--hot mess.
The main character, a toponymist, traces his mother’s steps to discover why she lost herself in Iceland. He goes to the Wasteland, the barren place in the middle of the country, to find her memory and hopefully himself. He purports to be on a quest to identify and name what hasn’t been named in this area of the country. He carries along with him a trunk of books, which he says are the identities of many others. Along the way he meets a cast of characters who help him find his way, tell his story, and even, possibly, stay alive.
But the Wasteland lays waste to time, men, and memory. If you make it through the main character’s gory amputation and castration, the mass slaughter of sheep, the long philosophical tangents, the near biblical recitation of murders and suicides through the centuries, and above all the 18 page long sentences in the last third of the book, you’ll find yourself more uncertain than ever about its contents. What is known by the end of the book cannot be counted on.
To put it formally, this book is representative of Icelandic postmodernism, or so says Alex Duwar. It’s won award after award and all certainly deservedly. The author reminisced recently that he wrote this book thinking only of pleasing himself, and according to my recommender, so be it. There’s something essentially authentic about this work. Something in the instability that leaves one hungry for more at the close of the text.
This book, in its attempt to describe the cataloging of external things, manages instead to catalog the internal—processes, thoughts, journeys, and ultimately, the soul, though the soul of the wasteland, the narrator, the author, or something else, I couldn’t begin to guess. As I flipped through the pages, I found myself doing a back and forth dance, trying to keep track of the “I,” not always an easy task. To me this book is a portrait of the mental dances we all do, trying not to lose track of ourselves and our memory, trying to nail down and understand the characters and places in our lives.
At the end of it all, Öræfi laughs at us for thinking such a task is possible but seems to hint its worth attempting anyway.
Read this book if you like hard stuff, languages, travelogues, encyclopedias, and James Joyce. Don’t read it if you dislike gore, sex, and 18 page sentences.
THE RECOMMENDER IN REVIEW
Jer is a contrarian, so it’s almost guaranteed he’ll disagree with my read of him in this section. I’ll keep it simple. I see through this book a person who likes to push boundaries; to look over the edge of the cliff, feel the thrill, and toss a rock down to hear the echo. Jer appreciates quality and has an innate sense for what’s good when it comes to art—and he isn’t afraid to call it like he sees it. As long as he doesn’t hand me something from the horror genre, I’ll always try to take Jer’s recommendations.
WHERE TO FIND IT
Jeremiah picked up this book at a great little shop called Deep Vellum in Dallas, TX. It’s proudly published for the first time in English by them. You can head there to pick up your own copy if you’re local, or you can get a copy online. Don’t forget to read Lytton’s (the translator’s) fantastic notes at the end.
