Hallgrímur Helgason: 101 Reykjavik
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, September 2003]
About the only good thing you can say about Hylnur Björn, the 33-year-old narrator of 101 Reykjavik (Scribner), by the Icelandic writer Hallgrímur Helgason, is that he isn’t vain. Day in and day out he rolls in his own sty of slovenly grandeur. His diet consists of brews, smokes, tube, E, pot, coke, and smut. His actions are puerile and damaging (tinkering with his sister’s birth-control stash, spritzing a party-hosting husband’s pillow with foreign perfume). And most of his private thoughts and public statements are snide, vulgar, and sexist, sometimes all at once. But vain he’s not. “I comb my hair up, over my receding hairline,” he tells us. “I realize I’m saddled with an outdated kind of new-wave hairdo. It’s like an old Stray Cats song glued to my skull, but it’s the best I can do.” And up bubbles a reason you might bear spending 300 pages with this guy: he’s aware of his own foibles; he can be funny; and his endless pop-culture references, for better or worse, remind us that the world he’s responding to is our own.
The question of this novel is when, if ever, Hylnur will grow up. He’s living (if you can call it that) with his mother and her female lover (whom he doesn’t bed so much as couch), spending his nights at the pub and his days happily jobless (“I walk down Laugevegur like a walking machine, with that unemployed stride. Pure clockwork. Like it’s the only thing I do. Like it’s what I’m paid for. A kroná for each step.“).
The walking machine picks up his pace really only once, to pursue what he sees as his one shot at redemption: Katarina, his web-pal from Hungary. Hylnur’s interior thought a third of the way through the book (“I’ll never fall in love. Katarina.”) provides the proper foreshadowing, so that late in the book, when he halts his smug suffering and for once goes after something – bolting from a groundless Amsterdam vacation to surprise his girl – we’re actually rooting for the guy. The result is just.
While there’s much in this book that’s tiresome – several indulgently bloated scenes and exchanges, Hylnur’s unending wiseass complaints – its spots of humor and clever turns of phrase do well to keep the reader going. From the pub’s jukebox, Hylnur hears “Prehistoric rock music spurting through the speakers,” peaking in “a twenty-three-year-old guitar solo.” Starving in a field alone, he compares his stomach to “a broken-down radio stuck on search.” And in one of several examples of the wit that remains in this English translation, he describes the music of Iceland (home to Bjork, remember) as “Sugary cubism.”
Ultimately, this book itself has a sugary effect, running on the bite-size narrative asides (“Andy. Still living on overtime in his Warhole”) and the unrewarding hyperness of the stream-of-conscious prose, and supplying the reader with the deflating hollowness of not having consumed anything of substance. And the book seems fine with this hollowness, choosing never to arrive at the nourishing redemption we probably wouldn’t believe. The result is a cavity of sorts, set permanently in Hylnur’s heart, and, only momentarily, in ours.
