The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Larissa Kyzer on LoveStar by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb and published by Seven Stories Press.

Larissa is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and with this continues her streak of Nordic lit reviews. LoveStar is a book I’ve been casting sidelong glances at here in the office, and have it high on my list of to-reads. But, with influences such as “Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kurt Vonnegut to George Orwell, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python,” Magnason is sure to please.

Here’s a bit from Larissa’s review:

When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can recall such a time.) He noted as much himself in a recent interview with The Reykjavík Grapevine: “[w]hen it came out in 2002 it was called a dystopian novel; now it’s being called a parody. We seem to have already reached that dystopia.”

It is difficult to create a fictional milieu that touches on anything remotely related to technology or The Future and doesn’t feel dated pretty much the minute the ink dries on the page. (My favorite example of this is the Ethan Hawke Hamlet adaptation, which came out in 2000 and was peppered with cutting edge technology . . . like fax machines and Polaroid cameras.) As such, it is no small accomplishment that in the ten years since LoveStar was released, the book feels not obsolete, but rather prescient, or at least exasperatingly plausible.

The novel kicks off at some indeterminate point in the future, after a series of freakish, but not cataclysmic, natural events lead a group of intrepid Icelandic scientists to seek wireless alternatives to current technology. (An oversaturation of “waves, messages, transmissions, and electric fields,” they believe, is to blame for such events as clouds of bees taking over Chicago, driving out residents and flooding the downtown area with ponds of honey.)

Head over here for the entire review.

When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can recall such a time.) He noted as much himself in a recent interview with The Reykjavík Grapevine: “[w]hen it came out in 2002 it was called a dystopian novel; now it’s being called a parody. We seem to have already reached that dystopia.”

It is difficult to create a fictional milieu that touches on anything remotely related to technology or The Future and doesn’t feel dated pretty much the minute the ink dries on the page. (My favorite example of this is the Ethan Hawke Hamlet adaptation, which came out in 2000 and was peppered with cutting edge technology . . . like fax machines and Polaroid cameras.) As such, it is no small accomplishment that in the ten years since LoveStar was released, the book feels not obsolete, but rather prescient, or at least exasperatingly plausible.

The novel kicks off at some indeterminate point in the future, after a series of freakish, but not cataclysmic, natural events lead a group of intrepid Icelandic scientists to seek wireless alternatives to current technology. (An oversaturation of “waves, messages, transmissions, and electric fields,” they believe, is to blame for such events as clouds of bees taking over Chicago, driving out residents and flooding the downtown area with ponds of honey.)

Then comes the dawn of the “the cordless man,” who can both communicate and be communicated to through entirely internal methods:

bq.When men in suits talked to themselves out on the streets and reeled off figures, no one took them for lunatics: they were probably doing business with some unseen client. The man who sat in rapt concentration on a riverbank might be an engineer designing a bridge . . . and when a teenager made strange humming noises on the bus, nodding his head to and fro, he was probably listening to an invisible radio.

None of this, of course, is too great an exaggeration on technology that has come into being in the last decade, and even the absurd advertising methods that quickly become the norm in the world of LoveStar feel accurate. People in debt can rent out their brains’ speech centers out and become “howlers,” automatically screeching advertisements or reminders at specific passersby (“I can’t believe that guy is still wearing a Blue Millets anorak!” or “_Dallas_ is starting!”). “Secret hosts” are hired by companies to go around surreptitiously selling their friends products within everyday conversations. And everything—from birth to love to death—is monetized and monopolized by one gigantic corporation and its subsidiaries: LoveStar.

All of this, it bears noting, is just prologue and backdrop to the novel’s main focus: such is the sheer density of the world that Andri Snær creates within just the first few chapters. There are two main plots that overlap, somewhat achronologically. One follows the executive LoveStar himself in the last hours of his life (Andri Snær has likened the character to Steve Jobs; another reviewer saw Kári Stefánson, the founder of deCODE Genetics). The other plot follows the repeatedly thwarted attempts of a young couple, Indridi and Sigrid, trying to evade the corporate machinations that would break them apart from one another and re-pair them with their supposedly scientifically verifiable perfect partner.

There is a lot going on—arguably a little too much, as some of the larger themes get somewhat lost in the sweep of the (literally) explosive climax, or are, in some cases, grandly dramatized, but done so with little finesse. Though overall, it’s compulsively readable, due in great part to Andri Snær’s kooky creativity and the novel’s simple, straightforward style of prose (credit here to translator Victoria Cribb, who has translated, among others, three novels by Sjón and Gyrðir Elíasson’s Stone Tree).

Read today—in the wake of not only myriad technological advances, but also a worldwide financial meltdown the consequences of which were profoundly felt in Iceland, and will continue to be so for probably decades to come— LoveStar feels a bit like cracking open a time capsule. Its world is poised on the edge of implosion, held in check by only the tiniest bit of better judgement. “If we don’t do it,” LoveStar remarks before embarking on one last, ruinous power quest, “someone else will.”

The article I wrote for Publishing Perspectives about the Iceland Literary Festival (along with a video interview with Kristjan B. Jonasson, the head of the Icelandic Publishers Association) will go live tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, I thought I’d put together a short write-up of some of the interesting contemporary Icelandic writers I met at the festival last week. This is obviously an incomplete list, but if you’re at all interested in finding out about Icelandic literature, it will hopefully serve as a good starting point:

• Kristín Ómarsdóttir has been a guest at the Ledig House and participated in the PEN World Voices Festival. So she’s not completely unknown in the States, although she has yet to have a book published in English . . . I think that’s going to change pretty soon though. Anna Stein is representing this poet, playwright, novelist, and art performer, and recently received an amazing sample translation of Kristin’s recent book Hér (Here) that is creepy and unnerving in a very compelling way. It opens with a soldier killing a family and his fellow soldiers in hopes of escaping the war and living a more peaceful life as a farmer. But it’s the scene with the eleven-year-old-girl and her barbies that’s really disturbing . . .

• Steinar Bragi also hasn’t made his way into English yet, but his novel Konur (Woman) was a huge success, and quite controversial. It’s also supposed to be rather disturbing (the short sample I read hinted at some of the creepiness in this book), but in a much different way. From talking to others, it sounds like the sort of novel that pisses off a lot of its readers, but these same readers tend to praise the book in the end for having the power to piss them off so thoroughly. (Intriguing, no?)

• Sjón is the author of a number of novels (including The Blue Fox, which was published in English by Telegram last year) and collections of poetry. But he’s probably most well known for writing the lyrics to a few Bjork songs, including “I’ve Seen it All” from Dancer in the Dark, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Phil Witte reviewed The Blue Fox for us a few months back, and called it “a pretty, touching, funny little book.” (Although he did have some issues with the translation.)

• Gyrðir Elíasson has been published in English by Comma Press in the UK. I received a copy of his short story collection Stone Tree when I was in Reykjavik, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Bragi Olafsson gave it some high praise though, and said that Gyrðir’s writing was very quiet and subtle, and that his most recent novel was amazing.

• Bragi Olafsson is one of Iceland’s most talented authors, and I’m not just saying that because he’s an Open Letter author. We published The Pets last fall to great acclaim, and will be bringing out The Ambassador next year. But it’s his novel that’s coming out in Iceland later this fall that has a lot of people excited. . . . A much longer work than his previous novels, the section I’ve read from this is incredible. Reminds me a bit of Flann O’Brien’s work, with a number of digressions and a somewhat absurd plot revolving around a guy who inherits a bunch of shoes. Hopefully we’ll be able to run a full review of the Icelandic edition in the near future.

• Andri Snær Magnason works in a number of genres and mediums and is a really nice, really funny guy. He wrote a kids book that was going to be translated into English, but the Canadian publisher wanted him to remove a) the reference to eating seals and b) all the mentions of friends hugging. Totally mental, and we assume it’s because they were afraid of what Midwesterners would think. (And yes, I’m from the Midwest, so I know you’re not all crazy.) But Andri’s big work is Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation, a book about the crazy free market economics that severely damaged Iceland and the impact these political and business deals have had on the environment of this beautiful, peaceful nation. Dreamland was recently made into a full-length documentary (I have a DVD copy and will write a review next week), a trailer for which can be found here. Andri also deserves a special shout-out for taking me on a tour of the totally abandoned “Financial District.” (And really, those aren’t unnecessary quotes—on a map of Reykjavik, there are various areas that are labeled. Places like Down Town, Up Town, Skyline, and “Financial District.” When I asked people about the quotes around this one particular part of town, they told me that it was intentionally ironic and due in part to the fact that the largest glass building in Reykjavik—a building that was supposed to serve as the HQ for the banking sector—is completely empty. It’s beyond spooky.)

• Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is a crime writer with two titles available in the U.S.: Last Rituals and My Soul to Take. As most everyone knows, Scandinavian crime fiction is a hot commodity, what with writers like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, etc., etc. During Kristjan B. Jonasson’s speech about the future of publishing in Iceland, he pointed out that Icelandic crime fiction didn’t even exist until 1997 or so. And that when he first read an Icelandic crime novel, he thought it was “total bullshit,” since there is no crime in Iceland . . .

More information about these and other Icelandic authors can be found at the Icelandic Literature Fund website (Agla at bok at bok.is is the person to contact for sample translations, etc.) and the Fabulous Iceland site that was set up to promote Iceland culture in advance of their being Guest of Honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair.