Recesses of the Mind: Aesthetics in the Work of Guðbergur Bergsson by Birna Bjarnadóttir (review)

The present reviewer differs here from the author of this book in following the Icelandic practice of using first names for Icelanders where it is clear who they are. As her preface indicates, Birna Bjarnadóttir aims to show that “[t]he aesthetics of [Guðbergur] Bergsson’s works involves a dialogue not only with Icelandic society and culture but also with certain writers in Western intellectual and literary culture.” The first chapter accordingly discusses Kierkegaard and Blanchot in relation to Guðbergur’s novel The Mind’s Tormented Love, while the second compares Guðbergur’s “Ideas on Beauty” with the views expressed in essays on literature by the Icelandic writers Grímur Thomsen, Benedikt Gröndal, Sigfús Daðason, and Sigurður Nordal. In chapter 3, St. Augustine’s theft of pears is compared with the narrator’s theft of coffee in Guðbergur’s novel The Mouse That Skulks, while in chapter 4 his novel The Heart Still Dwells in Its Cave and his short story “The Man Who Suffered a Misfortune” are discussed in relation to the aesthetics of Plotinus. In chapter 5, Kierkegaard, Derrida, and Nietzsche, and the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, are invoked in discussions of Guðbergur’s short story “An Image of Man from the Bible” and his novel The Mind’s Tormented Love, while in chapter 6 Nietzsche’s concept of tragedy is brought to bear on the two volumes of Guðbergur’s fictional autobiography covering his early years, Father and Mother and the Mysterious Power of Childhood and Like a Stone the Sea Polishes. In chapter 7, his novels Tómas Jónsson Bestseller, The Love Life of a Compatible Couple, and Anna are discussed mainly in relation to traditional Icelandic literary and cultural expectations. A brief epilogue is followed by translations, by Kristjana Gunnars and Adam Kitchen respectively, of the essay “Ideas on Beauty” and of excerpts from Flatey-Freyr, one of Guðbergur’s books of poetry.

If Guðbergur’s work “involves a dialogue” with Icelandic and other cultural traditions, it may be significant that Birna’s book comes close to being cast in the form of a dialogue. Consistently throughout the book she asks questions, often preceding them with an adversative But: “But is this actually a viable connection?” The questions are not always fully answered, and the connections pointed out are not always clear, but the questioning, inconclusive tendency of the book’s argument is effective in conveying an impression of the tantalizing ambiguity of much of Guðbergur’s work. Birna makes little of the fact that Guðbergur is the Icelandic translator of Don Quixote, a work that stands at the gateway from the medieval to the modern, and it may be asked how far Guðbergur’s work engages with the preoccupations of medieval literature. If Plotinus and Augustine are relevant to its study, so also are Chaucer, whose “Wife of Bath’s Tale” finds a kind of reversal in the story of Jói in Guðbergur’s essay on beauty, and Langland, with whom Guðbergur would doubtless agree in claiming (in connection with his novel Anna, and without mentioning Langland’s Piers Plowman) “that all books should be in A-version, B-version, and C-version.”¹ With its own approximation to the dialogue form of another medieval work, Snorri’s prose Edda, Birna offers in this stimulating book a valuable introduction to the work of an important writer, and many opportunities for comparison and analysis, the chief tools of the critic.