Book Report: Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller

Here’s a first: I am writing about a book I didn’t finish. My fascination with Icelandic literature is well documented (I couldn’t even pick a link for that one – I have a tag for Icelandic authors on this blog.) So, when I saw Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller by Guđbergur Bergsson in an article about books in translation, I immediately put it on hold at the library. But I just couldn’t get through it.

Unpopular Opinions

For example, I think romance novels are generally bad. Since discovering the genre a few years ago, I have enjoyed many romance novels by excellent writers. But the odds of picking up a random romance novel and it being crap are high. The only place you’ll find more bad writing is in the business section.

I am also dedicated to finishing books. Sometimes I temporarily abandon a book because it’s due at the library and I can’t renew; or maybe it’s just too challenging in light of other events in my life. But I always intend to return to the book and usually I do. I defend the slog. I can count the number of times I’ve intentionally not finished a book.

1. When I was pregnant, I read a pregnancy book that contained this sentence:

“During pregnancy, when the body naturally glows with health…” I threw the book across the room and then threw up.

2. I started a (probably self-published) travel narrative of a trip to Iceland. It was so bro-tastic that reading about places I’ve been and people I’ve met was not enough to counter the self-congratulatory backslapping.
3. The Mists of Avalon. I was in elementary school and several hundred pages into the book – definitely the most pages I’d ever read in a single book before. But no matter how much I’d already read, when Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot had a threeway, I was out.

Tómas Jónsson, Literary Influence

Now I can add Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller to the list. This is a recent translation, but was written in the 1960’s. It’s a major work of modern Icelandic literature. I’ve noticed that a lot of protagonists in Icelandic novels have a personality I more closely associate with the British middle class than the Icelandic temperament – judgmental, prudish, parsimonious, and petty. Now I know where that comes from.

Here’s how the publisher describes the book:

A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, Tómas Jónsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he’s going to write his own—a sure bestseller—that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, Tómas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir—something that’s as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published.

Considered by many to be the “Icelandic Ulysses” for its wordplay, neologisms, structural upheaval, and reinvention of what’s possible in Icelandic writing, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller was a bestseller, heralding a new age of Icelandic literature.

Alas, to me it was the Icelandic Ulysses for rambling, incomprehensible narrative and painful attention to minutiae with no clear sense of a larger story. (Poser alert: I’ve never actually read Ulysses, it just sounds like that’s what reading it would be like.)

DNF

I struggled through 180 pages. Every now and then, Tómas would tell a story it was liking talking to an old person and getting a snapshot of life in the old days. I’d get sucked in for a couple of pages. But too often I couldn’t tell if Tómas was talking or relating what someone else said. I couldn’t tell what was happening now or was a memory from long ago. Too often, it was like talking to a senile old person. I was just smiling politely, waiting for the story to come back into focus.

At least 160 of those 180 pages felt like work. Work can be meaningful, but this work felt as dead-end as Tómas Jónsson’s bank job.

I started bargaining with myself.

Read 10 pages of Tómas and then you can read a chapter of another book.

One chapter of my other book turned to three. I read two other books this way. Then a bunch of my holds came in at the library. There was no way I could read Tómas Jónsson and the other books before they came due. I couldn’t renew the others because there was a waitlist behind me, and I couldn’t bear to renew Tómas Jónsson.

I gave up and returned the book to the library, the last 200-some pages unread. It feels like a failure. But life is too short and my TBR pile too high to spend so much time struggling with a book I genuinely don’t enjoy.

Anyone who has read it and liked this book, please tell me why. Maybe you can give me a perspective that will make the work of slogging through this fictional memoir meaningful. I would love a reason to move Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller from a DNF to a “temporarily abandoned.”

Details

Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller

By Guđbergur Bergsson, 1966

Translated by Lytton Smith, 2017

Publisher: Open Letter