´Don´t go too far from the house and don´t spend too long outside. People can lose their lives and there are lot of foreigners who have died of exposure in Iceland. They get lost in the dark and simply freeze to death, and it´s a dreadful way to go. Yes, and watch out for foxes. They can attqacl people. Once there was a man who feel and broke his leg outside in storm, and a fox chewed his foot right off´.
Iceland is associated - more than my beloved Switzerland - with pristine landscapes and sky reflecting lagoons, an invitation to self reflection and serenity. But too much isolation in the middle of the nature - which is way different than the human projection of it - is a pressure the human fragility can hardly cope with.
The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir, translated by Quentin Bates himself a writer of crime fiction based in Iceland, was recently published by the courageous new edition house Corylus Books offering also a fine selection of Romanian Noir in English translation. Bringing talented authors of crime stories to the English audiences is a remarkable project and I will keep this edition house under the radar for the time being, both for the literary and the geographical selection.
The book is like no other I´ve read recently. The tension and suspense are insinuating surreptitiously while describing serene landscapes. The inevitability of the evil nested here and his further extension may be surprising at the first sight. In fact, the erratic human emotions mirror the uncontrollable force of natural phenomenon.
A Sri Lankan-born resident of Reykjavik arrives in a remote part of Iceland following a job offer at a beauty parlor. Once landed here and convinced that she was duped, she is trying to find some temporar work. An offer to clean at a farm owned by a weird mother-son duo comes with the perks of free lodging. But there is nothing like a free lunch as the two, plus the owner of a hostel with a shady past that actually brought her there, are part of a complex operation which involves drug dealing as well as bizarre belief into ´elf women´ and ´hidden people´.
25% into the book one may not be sure where everything is heading, although this isolated farm calls for ´noir´ - a bit cliché, I know. The mixture between imagination and reality is so well stirred up that far into the reading, the sipping may be lethal. The suspense is built up skilfully and only the introduction of new characters - such as the policeman on a leave, again a bit cliché - create a bit of diversion, enough until the next story threshold.
The tension and suspense do not always correspond to an equal development of the tensionate and suspenseful story as such, and the additional episodes created around the main plot are distracting and not always matching. The end is too precipitate and ordinary compared to the rest of the story.
However, The Fox - that has an outstanding book cover - was worth the reading ride and made me curious about the literary life in Iceland.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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