Bergsveinn Birgisson Roman “Die Insel Kolbeinsey” | EUROtoday

About 12,000 years in the past, an nearly unimaginable quantity of magma flocked from the chimney of an underwater volcano. Enormous steam explosions let the lava and ashes rise to sky, the water boiled. This was the start of an island: Kolbeinsey. This uninhabited spot is situated 105 kilometers north of the Icelandic north coast – and after it the Icelandic creator Bergsveinn Birgisson has named his new novel.

The story that relaxes on a superb 200 pages is shortly instructed: the depressive first-person narrator, who’s in the midst of his life and may really preserve college lectures, goes together with his additionally depressive pal on a street journey throughout the nation. Only that this pal ought to really be in a closed station of psychiatry. Finally, a nurse (“Madame Reisigrod”) units out to seize the escaped once more: with an electrical shocker and the uncooked energy of a sumoringer.

Right initially of the textual content there’s a passage which may be a key to studying this e-book. The first-person narrator declares that he hate the “Roman Essence”, “because of which people struggled to” seize actuality “by describing how the light of a 60-watt Osram lamp fell from a dusty pearl light on the gray dress of a red-haired woman of middle-aged and dark blue shadows between the wrinkles. The wounds of the existence of the fabric of all poetry? ” That is the tone with which Birgisson, born in Reykjavík in 1971, lets his narrator mislead by way of the nation, on the lookout for …

Yes, what really? Salvation? Knowledge? Freedom? It would not get that clear. After all: the 2 scrubs a number of kilometers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make a superb e-book. On the best way, the depressed persons are in an off -road car, the nurse follows them with their Toyota (“Yaris of death”). During this drive by way of Iceland, which leads by way of detours to the Epenzen island of Kolbeinsey, the narrator all the time displays. A nimpered headache over the world, literature, about life, loneliness and, and, and. Unfortunately, greater than large phrases could be discovered too hardly ever on this brood novel. The distinction between brooding and considering? The latter is focused, productive, the previous is misplaced in aimlessness – the ideas are improper, and too usually one ends in a useless finish. So additionally the first-person narrator in “The Island of Kolbeinsey”.

Now there are roadrip novels that impress with the legendary scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and horror in Las Vegas”: “Say… “But in fact.” Or you can keep in mind, as spoken alive in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s bestseller “Tschick”. In “The Island of Kolbeinsey” there is not only a lot of pondered, but also a lot, unfortunately too often in indirect speech, and because this often has something stubborn in German, the text falls on the feet: “Whether it’s so obscure that there might by no means have been any artwork or something good, and what your which means is sick!”

Birgisson all the time has nice concepts that basically work, Nordic humor à la Hallgrímur Helgason (“Ten tricks to finish and begin the homicide”) or Erlend Loe (“Naive.”): The two depressed climb a ferry, with Japanese tourists and the box in which the nurse. The Japanese are curious: “Whether island residents all the time traveled with such containers as an alternative of suitcases? Always, my pal replied, we refuse to be trendy! The Japanese laughed in kindly. They instantly began to take images of those peculiar males and their baggage. My depressive pal reacted to it by posing in entrance of the field, he had discovered his hand on a pointed hoe, which was discovered on the highest, as if the field was below his field. Feet a walrus or whale that he had dropped at the space. “

The reality in this text is increasingly disintegrating. The walls of a house melt, northern lights take on the shape of a woman. This should be the morphine that pulsates in the veins in the veins-or the hallucinogenic mushrooms he throws in. A lot of kitchen philosophy follows, which, as so often, unfortunately does not lead to much. The first-person narrator of this novel is condemned to pull through the program that the author forced him: pondering, perceiving, being depressed. This makes him look strangely pale as well as his friend and the nurse. At best, literary characters are so vivid, so strong and convincing that they remain in your memory for a long time. This may be difficult with this novel.

Bergsveinn Birgisson: “Die Isel Kolbeinsey”. Roman. From the Icelandic by Eleonorte Gudmunson. Residenz Verlag, Vienna 2025. 224 S., born, 26, – €.