Gyðir Elíasson

This extraordinary, quirky and wonderfully transporting collection from Eliasson includes twenty-five very short stories, most only around three pages in length. Set in the western shores of Iceland, his characters seem all too human, and maybe that’s his magic.

Like any collection, certain stories stay with the reader more than others…and here as I sit browsing through the collection again for this review (such that it will be), I want to read it all over again. Did I mention that books show up in some of these stories?

A few of the stories that have stayed with me….

"The Bus" Out on a walk, a man observes a family of nine living in an old black bus and later dreams of it….

"The Lost Grimm’s Fairytale" A seemingly idyllic walk is brought down to reality….

"A House of Two Stories" Imagine a house where a Vicar lives upstairs and a teacher downstairs, neither having anything to do with other, but the are both translating Steinbeck’s works …(one translating the long works, the other the short…)

"The Flight to Halmstead" Instead of taking a vacation together, a husband convinces his wife to go on a solo vacation to Sweden, while he’ll stay home to“get something done” …. (something got done alright —and not what you are probably thinking!)

But my favorite (for the pictures it drew) was…:"Book After Book": Here are two quotes from it:

"…The fridge was half full of books but contained almost nothing to eat. he grabbed one of the books…"

"…books hovered like sinister birds in his imagination, flapping their black covers, ruffling their white pages like breast feathers."… (meer)

I had got out of the habit of reading short stories. Through this wonderful book, I think I have returned to the appreciation of a small piece of work, well-turned though without a tidy beginning or end, rather like a snippet out of life. Through its really short vignettes, its immense scope, and its merging of the contemporary and the historical and even ancient, this collection presents an entire cosmos, a series of worlds that are each fully realised in the dimensions of time, social, physical and the inner life of the characters, so that within a few lines, the reader is there, with them. Then, the smallest gestures, the ambience of the land, the appearance (and non-appearance) of totally mundane objects or events, are all imbued with vast significance in these stories that sometimes aren't even stories, but mood pieces in which, however, future events can be clearly discerned. Although the style is as varies as the theme, Elaisson often reminds me of Chekhov, and as far as short stories go, for me that's as good as it can get.… (meer)