Hamlet Smokes Prince: 101 Reykjavik on Page and Screen

Hallgrímur Helgason’s novel 101 Reykjavik, first published in

1996, was made into a film directed by Baltasar Kormákur in

2000 and was subsequently translated into English by Brian

Fitzgibbon in 2002. In one sense, both novel and film are

adaptations, in that while the film is clearly based on the

novel, the novel in turn both alludes repeatedly to the works

of the Nobel prizewinning Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness,

as I shall be discussing, but also, and even more

insistently, patterns itself on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with

one of its central jokes being that its hero, unemployed 33-

year-old Icelander Hlynur Björn Hafsteinsson, is both

extraordinarily like Hamlet in temperament and situation and

yet, in a way that the novel itself presents as part of the

essence of Hamletism, also so self-obsessed that he does not

know so. Instead, he drifts through a series of Hamletesque

situations thinking only of how they affect himself, without

ever registering either that others are also involved or that

his ‘self’ is in fact constructed and conditioned by external

powers and precedents. By the end of the book, however, it

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is clear that Hamletism is not, as it was for Chekhov, a

badge of doom, but actually a condition which can be outgrown

and survived, as Hlynur Björn finally starts to take an

interest in someone other than himself, his infant son /

brother - the baby borne by his lesbian mother’s lover whom

he himself has probably fathered.

Baltasar Kormákur’s film adaptation of Helgason’s novel

suppresses much of the Hamletism of the original book.

Kormákur also apparently proposes a more thorough

reintegration into society for Hlynur Björn, by presenting

him as not only bonding with members of it but also as

gainfully employed by it. However, his job of traffic

warden, though apparently relished by Hlynur, is hardly

likely to strike the rest of us as the be-all and end-all of

existence, and Kormákur’s choice of this as the closing

moment of his film, although not wholly without textual

warrant since the Hlynur of Helgason’s book does have an

encounter with a traffic warden, surely also tells us

something about what Kormákur sees as the limitations of what

Reykjavik has to offer in career terms. This is an

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impression confirmed by the publicity he did at the time of

the film’s release, when he made it clear that what he most

hoped 101 Reykjavik would prove to be was his ticket of escape

from Reykjavik, and onto the wider stage of world cinema.

For Helgason’s original book, talking about Hamlet proved an

exceptionally eloquent way of talking about Icelandic

identity and the cultural and literary forces by which it has

been conditioned; for Kormákur, though, talking about

Icelandic identity is a way of limiting and crushing the

potential resonances and appeal of his cinema, so Hamlet must

go. For Hamlet is, in fact, Icelandic. Although the

earliest extant version of his story is that offered by Saxo

Grammaticus, it seems to have originated in Iceland, as was

pointed out in 1898 by Israel Gollancz in his book Hamlet in

Iceland, and confirmed by modern scholarship: William F.

Hansen, editing Saxo, argues that ‘is is reasonable to infer

that the tale derives from Icelandic rather than from Danish

tradition’ (3), not least because ‘[a]bout two centuries

before Saxo ... an Icelandic poet refers to sand as “Amlodi’s

meal”’ (5), while ‘[a]s a common noun amlodi is current in

Icelandic in the sense of “an imbecile, weak person”’ (6).

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For Helgason, then, Hamlet is a part of his country’s past,

and figures as such in what I shall show is, despite its

apparently meandering nature, actually a strongly

teleologically-orientated narrative, which charts the

progress and development of Iceland as much as of its central

character; for Kormákur, though, Hamlet is fundamentally

associated with the country he seeks above all to escape.

From the very outset, Helgason’s original book presents

itself as an appropriation of Hamlet. The book opens as

follows:

Anyway. I normally try to wake up before dusk. To get

some light into my day, check in, punch my card. The

sun is a time clock. Even if you’re not working. For

the sun or anyone else. Hey. Solar system, welfare

system.

Waking up never gets easier. It’s like you’ve been

buried for 400 years and have to claw your way through

six feet of mud. Every day. The light filters through

the curtains. All of a sudden it’s as if the numbers on

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my radio alarm were years. 1601. Woke up too early,

not due to be born for another 400 years. (4)

In case his readers are in any doubt about the significance

of the date / time 1601, which is the Arden 2 edition’s best

guess for the most likely date of Hamlet, Helgason almost

immediately underlines the point as his hero, Hlynur Björn,

notes that ‘I fasten my watch, chain myself to time, the

rotations of the planet, the sun, the whole system: 1616’

(4). 1616 was the year in which Galileo, under pressure from

the church, recanted his theory of heliocentrism, and the

interest in the solar system is registered again when Hlynur

laments that his mother has put too many Cheerios in the

bowl: ‘The right portion is 365 rings’ (4). (In the English

translation the book also has 365 pages).

Further underlining the chronological theme, Hlynur then

continues,

1637. Yeah. I can read the years on my wrist. Each

day is a history of mankind. Christ is born at

midnight, the Roman Empire passes out in a wild all-

night party, and then the Vikings meet at the crack of

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dawn, already gang-banging by nine. The lunchtime news

is read from the Sagas – ‘A huge fire erupted at Njal’s

place last night’ – and then a nap after lunch, slumber,

the plague, Dark Ages, until we wake up to the blast of

that Michelangelo guy’s chisel in 1504. The

Renaissance. Shakespeare scribbling furiously to meet a

1615 deadline.

(4)

The novel is by no means immune to the interest of the

distinctively Icelandic element of this chronology, the

Sagas, since Hlynur’s rich, staid brother-in-law is named

Magnús, which may well allude to an important figure in

Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: ‘King Magnus the Good ... was

deeply mourned by everyone’ and his friend Einar Paunch-

Shaker ‘concluded by saying that he thought it better to

follow King Magnus dead than any other king alive’ (76).

However, despite that odd date of 1615, Helgason is far more

interested in Shakespeare, perhaps not least because there is

indeed an intersection between Shakespeare and the Sagas, in

the shape of Saxo Grammaticus: Mats Malm notes that

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The Nordic historical source which was most accessible

for learned Europeans was the Gesta Danorum written by

Saxo Grammaticus near the beginning of the thirteenth

century ... Gesta Danorum was published for the first

time in Paris in 1514 and translated into Danish in

1575. (101)

Saxo was, of course, a principal source for the Hamlet story,

and it is as an Icelandic Hamlet that Hlynur Björn

insistently presents himself.

Not surprisingly, one of the principal sources of the Hamlet

parallels in the book centres on Hlynur’s father. Early in

the narrative, Hlynur’s friend Thröstur rings to say he saw

Hlynur’s father at the Castle the night before (5-6). (The

idea that in the modern world the Castle can be best

represented by a pub is also found in Matt Haig’s Dead Fathers

Club, another modern take on Hamlet.) Hlynur asks ‘How did he

look?’, to which Thröstur replies ‘Yeah, fine. Kind of

third-dayish’ (6), with a clear suggestion of rising again on

the third day appropriate to a revenant figure. Soon, the

suggestion that Thröstur is a Horatio-figure is reinforced by

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the fact that his friend Marel / Marri provides an obvious

analogue for Marcellus. When Hlynur himself sees his

father, he ‘sails past. Like a ghost’ (14), and later Hlynur

notes that ‘Dad’s the crazy Scotch king who pisses in every

ear and drinks from every beer. “Thou art begotten of a

king” ... Yeah. I smoke Prince’ (16-17). It takes another

member of Hlynur’s family, though, to underline the full

force of this: Hlynur’s sister Elsa, whose relevance to the

Hamlet theme is confirmed by the fact that when she

miscarries, the foetus is buried and the funeral takes the

structural place of Ophelia’s (271). Previously Hlynur has

apostrophised the contraceptive pill he stole from Elsa, in

an act which presumably caused her pregnancy, in terms

notably evocative of Hamlet:

Hold it before me, like Mel Gibson in Hamlet holding up

that skull, and talking to it in his highfalutin

English, saying how incredible it was to think that this

used to be a really funny guy, and I feel just like him,

just like Mel, with all these fancy Icelandic subtitles

flickering on my chest, except it’s the other way round:

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I’m talking to the death that precedes life, the

obstacle blocking its path.

(103)

Suggestively, Elsa is called after their Danish grandmother

and the name is reminiscent of Elsinore (239) – imagining his

own funeral, Hlynur thinks ‘I forget the senile grannies.

Else Helsinore or Helsingör and Thurídur ... Can’t remember

Granny’s patronymic’ (329).

It is this which alerts us to the profound resonance which

Hamlet’s father-obsession has for Helgason’s novel. There is

a sharp contrast here in Hlynur’s approach to his two

grandmothers which is particularly significant in Icelandic

culture, where personal names almost invariably take the form

of first name and patronymic rather than first name and

surname, and where Thurídur is in any case a resonant name

because of its occurrence in the Sagas, at least once in a

context which further underlines the importance of fathers:

in Laxdaela Saga, we hear of Thurídur Olafsdottir, great-

granddaughter of Egil Skalagrimsson of Egil’s Saga, while in

Eybryggja saga, which Torfi Tulinius has recently compared to

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the Hamlet story (5), one of the several characters with

problematic parentage (he is clearly not the son of his

official father) is Kjartan, whose mother is called Thuridur.

(Two characters in the saga also have fathers who return from

the dead.) For Icelanders in general, the name of the

father is the foundation stone of identity, but for Hlynur,

only his maternal ancestry is remembered, something which

strikes at the heart of the Icelandic sense of self.

Other characters or motifs from Hamlet also find their echo,

and each Hamlet-inflected character (or pair of characters in

the case of Rosy and Guildy) is used to examine a different

aspect of Icelandic identity formation. Hofy, daughter of a

dentist, is the Ophelia figure, to whom Hlynur says ‘It would

cost you a groaning to take off my edge’ (26) and who has a

brother called Lerti. Although Hlynur condemns himself

rather than her when he says ‘Frailty, thy name is Hlynur’

(227), Hlynur’s conversation with Hofy’s father is closely

modelled on Hamlet’s with Polonius, including ‘Words, words,

words’ and ‘Slander, sir. This is a whole chapter on

dentists’ (216-8), and it is also in connection with Hofy’s

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father that Hlynur muses Hamlet-like on skulls: ‘Six thousand

years from now their fillings will still be clinging to those

skulls’ (160). Hofy prompts Hlynur into a musing on beauty

and cosmetics very similar to Hamlet’s:

What’s beauty? If you have to paint over it to make it

worth anything? What’s that? Just a con. A single

tear and the whole thing’s blotched. Dampens the

powder. All those marriages – with all their luggage of

offspring, sucklings and barbecues, jeeps and skiing

gadgets, garden huts and Jacuzzis, snow-mobiles,

baptismal gowns and deluxe coffins – all of that – hangs

on two miserable grams of powder and lipstick, dull,

dull eye shadow.

(57)

The thrust of this is both similar to and different from

Hamlet’s condemnation of Ophelia, for at its heart lies not a

concern with women but a concern with Iceland, and the

question of whether its astonishing twentieth-century

transformation from one of the poorest countries in the world

to one of the richest has entailed the imperilling of its

soul.

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Nor does Helgason’s novel lack its Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern. Not only does Hlynur’s father’s new partner

runs the Rosenkrans Café (81), but

Rosy and Guildy come in and sit down. They’ve got it

sussed. Two supergays. Always together. The longest-

standing relationship I know of. Rosy is the ‘crantsy’

one, and Guildy is ‘stern’. Some in-joke of theirs. I

haven’t the faintest idea of what they mean.

(4-5)

Rosy and Guildy soon reveal that they have just been to see a

play: ‘It’s got everything. There’s a touch of Gudbergur in

it, a bit of Hamlet, a bit of panto, Tarantino, and even a

pinch of Oedipus’ (46) – an allusion which picks up on the

earlier episode when Hofy takes Hlynur’s glasses off during

sex: ‘Oh no. She might as well be removing my nose. The

tinted glasses removed. The filter between me and the rest

of the world’ (29). Later Rosy wears ‘a violet T-shirt

inscribed with “To Me Or Not To Me”’ (51), and Hlynur listens

to a song from the play in question, ‘The Omelette’ whose

first line is ‘Hamlet lives in Reykjavik and smokes his

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Danish Prince’ (52). Just as the arrival of Shakespeare’s

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern coincides with that of the

players, then, so Rosy and Guildy serve to flag a concern of

increasing importance in Helgason’s book, a cinematic

sensibility. Typical of this are Hlynur’s musings as he

watches a pair of strangers making love:

I gradually realize this is the first documentary I’ve

seen about the Icelandic species. And I’ve got to say

it reminds me a bit of Icelandic movies. Children of

Nature. There’s no plot in it. No angle variation

whatsoever. Looks like we’re in for an epic feature.

(184)

The interest in films and filmic techniques thus announced is

almost as strongly developed as the interest in Hamlet. When

Hlynur, his mother and Lolla go to his sister Elsa’s for

Christmas, they have to watch the video of the previous year

– ‘The tape’s in, Magnús in his chair, and it’s Christmas

again. Xmas, the repeat. Last year’s Christmas Day videoed

in this very room’ (86) – leading Hlynur to conclude that

This whole crowd should be buried along with their home

videos, like Pharaohs with all their regalia, so that

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they can watch themselves again on the other side. Or

maybe we’re already on the other side? Who knows, maybe

it would be better that way. I mean, since we have to

put up with these family dos anyway, maybe we could just

as well watch them on videotape. At least we wouldn’t

have to worry about where our next line was going to

come from.

(87)

Later, he ponders how ‘The tree stands in the garden showing

its ten fingers to the heavens and, with the aid of some

special effects kindly provided by the film industry, they

turn into ten burnt knuckles’ (101), and he doesn’t want to

watch the fireworks because ‘I prefer to follow the event on

TV, more convincing somehow’ (108). Indulging in his

inveterate habit of pricing women, he observes, ‘A 50,000

beaut comes gliding towards us with an empty glass and a

freeze-frame expression on her face’ (115), and a

conversation with his friend is conditioned by cinematic

metaphor:

‘Hofy,’ says Thröstur.

‘Yeah. OK. Listen, ehm.’

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‘Yeah, listen ... Just remember we’re going out live ...

no re-editing afterwards.’

(123)

Even while he’s kissing Lolla ‘All of a sudden I see myself,

like I’m standing on the living-room floor looking at myself

on the sofa’ (125), and along similar lines he notes that

‘Lolla is more than just number seven on my list. We’re

talking basic instinct here’ (126). When he comes, ‘All the

movies of the world roll before my eyes’ (128); it is with

justice that he concludes that ‘My inner man is probably a

cameraman’ (285), since as he watches the couple having sex

he muses ‘I’m a fixed camera angle here’ (183).

Introducing this motif is not, however, the only purpose

served by the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figures, and

ultimately prepare him for the end of his story. As in

Shakespeare’s play, it is also they who educate Hlynur /

Hamlet about death: the epigraph of the section in which he

goes to Amsterdam with Rosy and Guildy is ‘ON THE LOWEST DECK

OF NIGHT A NAKED ME’. His ‘brush with death’ comes in the

form of discovering that Guildy has AIDS, upon which he

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resolves to have unprotected sex to contract it himself

(243). In Amsterdam they stay at the ‘Hotel Rosencrantz &

Guildenstern. The coin slowly begins to drop. To me or not

to me?’ (297), and when Hlynur leaves them in Amsterdam to go

to Paris he asks a stranger to kill him (318). Ultimately

though it is Guildy who turns him from death to life:

How does one die?

‘It takes a life to die,’ Guildy said.

(329)

Although Hlynur does get lost in the snow after this it is

not, as it will be in the film, a conscious suicide attempt

(354), nor is it even, as one might expect from the parallels

with Hamlet, a prelude to a resigned death; rather, in a

particularly neat instance of Hlynur’s typically Hamletian

refusal to see the Hamletism of his own position, it helps

him affirm a will to live and an interest in future

generations, and paves the way for the ultimately

surprisingly upbeat conclusion to the book, in which Hlynur

finds peace in the rôle of son by embracing that of father.

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When Hlynur meets his father, the revelation that the ghostly

figure makes to him is that his mother is a lesbian and

having an affair with a woman called Lolla (16), whom Hlynur

has assumed to be simply a friend, but whom he now calls ‘my

new stepfather’ (93). Lolla brings out Hlynur’s inner Hamlet

possibly even more strongly than his father or Hofy does. He

writes that

I walk down Laugavegur [Reykjavik’s main shopping

street] in the fatness of these pursy times. ‘In the

fatness of these pursy times?’ Where did that come

from? Yeah. I feel like I’m caught in some rotten

ancient plot when Lolla suddenly appears from a door.

(124)

Later, on a chatshow, he watches someone who confesses to

sleeping with his mother’s girlfriend because ‘I always

wanted to sleep with my mother and, you know, she was the

next best thing’ (152). The discovery of his mother’s

relationship with Lolla is a blow, because Hlynur, like

Hamlet, is fond of his mother, who not only supports but also

indulges him – ‘Mom always brings something home for me’ (7)

– and also, like Hamlet, has a less than satisfactory love-

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life himself; as he notes, ‘Conscience does make cowards of

our balls’ (170). The situation is further complicated when

he finds himself increasingly attracted to Lolla and

ultimately sleeps with her. When she subsequently announces

that she is pregnant, she claims to have used a sperm donor,

but Hlynur suspects that the baby is his, and for some time

believes that he has made three women pregnant: Lolla, Hofy,

and his sister Elsa, by stealing her pill. Hofy aborts and

Elsa miscarries, but Lolla gives birth to a son, and it is in

his relationship with that son that Hlynur at the close of

the book finds a new life.

The positive note of the ending, albeit muted, obviously owes

nothing to Hamlet. Rather, it betrays a debt to another

source. As well as its insistent engagement with Hamlet,

Helgason’s novel is also informed by an equally insistent

interest in Icelandic culture and history, and to one element

of it in particular. After the encounter with Hofy during

which she later thinks she has conceived, Hlynur writes ‘I

walk home. Stagger, I should say. The time is 874’ (32).

874 was the date of the arrival in Iceland of Ingólfur

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Arnason, the country’s first settler, who is commemorated by

a large statue in central Reykjavik, and is of iconic

significance in the country’s history. The importance of

Ingólfur Arnason is registered again, albeit indirectly,

through Hlynur’s obsession with the Nobel-prize-winning

Icelandic author Halldór Laxness, who features in his private

‘black museum’ of bizarre looted objects: ‘a friend of Mom’s

works at the Reykjalundur rest home and collects Halldór

Laxness’s Nobel-prized shaved hair in a plastic bag. I must

almost have a kilo of the stuff by now’ (220). Hlynur also

suggests that rather than saying ‘for Chrissakes’ ‘You could

also say Halldór Kiljan, for example. I’m trying to

introduce it. It’s open to quite a few variations too, You

can say Halldór Kiljan or just Kiljan or Halldór Laxness.

Holy Kiljan is a good one too, or “Laxness, man ... ”’ (56)

(Kiljan was Laxness’s middle name). Particularly pertinent

for the theme of Helgason’s novel is Laxness’s classic

Independent People (1934-5), in which the central relationship

is between Bjartur and his wife’s child Asta Sollilja

(‘beloved sun-lily’), whom he brings up as his daughter but

who is in fact the biological daughter of the resonantly-

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named Ingólfur Arnason Jonsson, the bailiff’s son. This, of

course, means that Asta Sollilja goes through life with a

false patronymic – she is known as Asta Sollilja

Gudbjartsdóttir when she should be Asta Sollilja

Ingolfsdóttir, making a nonsense of the core principle which

underpins Icelandic nomenclature and sense of identity, and

this is something that will be echoed in 101 Reykjavik when

Lolla’s son, the resonantly named Halldór, is officially

Halldór Stefansson but may in fact be actually Halldór

Hlynsson.

Independent People also shares other features with Helgason’s

novel. Firstly, there is the easy mixture of the

scatological and cynical with the existential: when Bjartur

first arrives in Summerhouses, where he makes his home,

Standing on the highest point of the knoll, like a

Viking pioneer who has found his high-seat posts, he

looked about him, then made water, first to the north in

the direction of the mountain, then to the east, towards

the marshy tracts and the lake and the river flowing

smoothly from the lake through the marshes; then towards

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the moors in the south, where the Blue Mountains, still

coated with snow, closed the horizon in meditation. (19)

In this passage, the reference to the high-seat posts

directly recalls the account of how when Ingólfur Arnason

first arrived in Iceland he threw his high-seat posts

overboard and resolved to settle wherever they came ashore;

they were later found on the site of what subsequently became

Reykjavik. Bjartur, then, here merges eerily into the avatar

of the contemporary Ingólfur Arnason Jonsson who is his

rival, at the same time as the tone of the narrative moves

easily between solemnity and irreverence, and also brings us

back to the foundational moment of all Icelandic identity.

In addition, Independent People shares with Helgason’s novel a

motif of pseudo-incest, albeit one which is here much more

lightly developed: when Asta Sollilja goes to the

neighbouring town of Fjord with Bjartur and shares a bed with

him,

One of the two buttons of her knickers had by some

chance become unfastened, and in the next moment she

felt his hand, strong and warm, on her flesh.

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(237)

Both Bjartur and Hlynur are also, in their own way, poets:

Bjartur composes technically difficult verse which no-one

else wants to hear, Hlynur indulges in long, solitary

meditations on the apparently mundane. Finally, both books

are interested in Icelanders’ legendary ability to trace

their ancestry back to 874, which gave rise to the ill-fated

Icelandic genome project: Laxness, sardonic as usual, notes

that

If he approved of them, as the saying went, Bruni might

even help them to buy some land, and then they would own

the land, in name at least, and would be styled

freeholders on the rate bills and church accounts; and

when they were dead there they were in the parochial

register for the consideration of genealogists.

(24-5)

This finds its equivalent in 101 Reykjavik, where Hylnur thinks

of the K Bar that ‘This place is worse than the waiting room

up at the VD clinic. Everyone hooked to the same DNA chain’

(43), and when Marri says of his Mexican brother-in-law ‘He’s

lived here for ages’ Hlynur, illiberal for once but true to

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the Icelandic stress on continuity, says ‘He’s still an

immigrant’. Most notably, both books end with the acceptance

of a child who is possibly or certainly not biologically

related to the hero, for the climax of 101 Reykjavik comes when

Hlynur bonds with his son / brother ‘Halldór Stefánsson. But

he’s so obviously a Hlynsson’ (360). Equally significant is

the date / time at which this occurs: ‘It’s 1944 by the time

I’m standing’ (360) – that is, the year in which Iceland

gained its independence from Denmark and began to win free of

the crippling poverty of which Laxness writes, into the

present affluence which enables the welfare system on which

Hlynur depends. Ironically, then, the most essentially

Laxnessian moment of Helgason’s novel also marks the point at

which it moves on from Laxness and the world he represents to

forge its own path, into an independent future.

Another manifestation of the book’s refusal to depend solely

on Laxness is the fact that he is not the only literary

figure with Icelandic associations to be mentioned:

Iceland is a big country and yet here I am, squashed up

against a radiator with the whole town on top of me,

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squeezing me ever tighter against this radiator, and I

can feel the heat from the water, which is obviously

reaching me after a day’s journey from the centre of the

earth to warm me.

(178)

The allusion here is not only to Reykjavik’s geothermal water

supply, but also specifically to Jules Verne’s Journey to the

Centre of the Earth, which opens in the Reykjanes peninsula, while

there is a cultural reference of a different kind when

‘things are a bit crowded tonight due to some pop-star guys

at that table over there, Blur or Oasis’ (290); it will of

course be Damon Albarn from Blur, joint owner of the

Kaffibarinn bar in Reykjavik. Other elements from popular

and urban culture also crop up. We hear of Hveragerdi, the

‘garden of Eden’ which is a perennial stop on the popular

Golden Circle tour; the World’s Strongest Man, a competition

in which Icelanders have traditionally triumphed; Reykjavik

street names; the Hotels Saga and Borg; Mt Esja, the range

which is visible on the other side of the bay from Reykjavik;

Hallgrimúr’s church, famous as the tallest building in

Iceland, and the transmission mast that it was built to

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conceal; the Icelandic habit of eating ptarmigan for

Christmas; and the beloved New Year’s Eve comedy special

(which Helgason himself wrote in 1996). In some respects,

reading this novel is a little like reading the Lonely Planet

guide to Iceland.

Reading the novel, however, proves to be very different from

seeing it. Despite the cinematic sensibility of Helgason’s

book, Hlynur’s wish to watch notably fails to extend to being

watched. Late in the novel, he declares that ‘A part of me

always disappears when people look at me’ (294); earlier, he

has thought that ‘It’s comforting, somehow, to live on an

island that doesn’t appear on the map of the world.

Invisible. We’re not there. We’re just watching, but no one

can see us’ (128). The way in which we experience his story

does in fact shift markedly when it moves from page to

screen, and there is a sense in which Hlynur as a literary

creation does indeed prove not very susceptible to being

watched, for Baltasar Kormákur’s film proves willing or able

to engage with only some of the concerns which feature so

strongly in the novel. It does speak strongly to the orignal

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book’s interest in Icelandic culture: it features music from

Damon Albarn, whose Reykjavik bar is co-owned with Kormákur,

and the fact that it was shot on location means that it is as

steeped as the book itself in the sights and atmosphere of

central Reykjavik. It also, perhaps inevitably, responds to

the book’s cinematic sensibility: a girl in the K-Bar says to

Hlynur ‘You look tense. Almost like you were on live TV’;

Hlynur himself fantasises about shooting everyone at

Christmas dinner at Elsa’s before they play the video of last

Christmas; and he says of the New Year fireworks display, ‘It

looks much better on TV, you know. It looks more real

somehow’.

The film is, though, only very residually interested in the

Hamlet theme which was so strongly developed in the original

book, although Kormákur’s later The Sea (2002), also starring

Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, who played Hlynur, has been compared

to King Lear (and certainly shares the interest in metacinema:

one character declares ‘We’re not in a film’, and the hero’s

sister, Ragnheidur [Gudrún Gísladóttir], went to film school

in Poland.) Although much of 101 Reykjavik is set at Christmas,

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as that other Hamlet take the Bleak Midwinter is, and it starts

with Hofy taking off Hlynur’s glasses during sex, this

emphasises resonates only with the Oedipal subtext of Hamlet

rather than with the text itself. Far more marked than the

similarities are the differences. In the film, Hlynur’s

mother comes into his bath and hands him the towel as he gets

out, but she pressures him to grow up and get a job, and

though Hlynur says ‘Even the ghosts are bored here’, the

ghost motif is not applied to his father: instead he tells

his mother ‘I saw him last night, actually’ with no preamble.

He doesn’t steal Elsa’s pill, and his sleeping with Lola

blurs into childhood recollection of his father drunk and

getting into bed with his mother; it is in any case much less

incestuous than in the book because his mother doesn’t tell

him that she and Lola are an item until after he’s slept with

her, upon which he asks ‘Does that mean that the two of us

can never ...?’, though the viewer might perhaps already have

guessed because while Hlynur and Lola have sex she

inadvertently smashes the glass of a family photo. There are

no Rosy and Guildy, so Hlynur ‘tries’ suicide from AIDS with

no prompt. The walk through the snow also seems like a

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suicide attempt, prompted by the christening of Lola’s baby.

(He has already proposed moving out when he hears about the

baby.) Most notably, the film ends on a strikingly different

note from the book: the baby looks at him and says ‘Daddy’,

and he subsequently becomes a traffic warden, a job which he

apparently enjoys. Though the logic underlying this relates

to the Hamlet-like theme of existential angst, since a

traffic warden has previously said to him that ‘You make me

unnecessary’ when he starts randomly filling other people’s

meters, it has nothing to do with the essentially interior

nature of the way in which the Hlynur of the book finds

peace. If the Hamlet story begins life as fully assimilated

in Nordic culture, then in the film of 101 Reykjavik we have

come full circle, for here it is silently reabsorbed.

What causes Kormákur’s silencing of Hamlet? On one level, it

could simply be that Kormákur’s film refuses Hamlet because,

even more than Helgason’s original book, it refuses a tragic

narrative (which also supplies a reason for jettisoning the

doomed, epic grandeur which characterises such earlier

inscriptions of Icelandic identity as Laxness’s novels and

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the Sagas). When Laxness wrote Independent People, Iceland was

one of the poorest countries in the world; now it is one of

the richest, and Reykjavik’s reputation as the capital of

cool has given it a newly-found self-confidence. As a

result, Kormákur’s film, unlike the story of Hamlet, is about

success, not failure, and about finding a way forward in a

new and changing world rather than clinging to the old one.

Another reason may lie in some of the causes for prosperity,

as indicated by the fact that, as is fitting for its status

as a Hamlet adaptation, the book is intensely aware of the

English language, which the US presence in Keflavik and

satellite TV have made a second language in modern Iceland,

in ways which not all Icelanders find comfortable. Hlynur’s

mother, looking at his computer, asks ‘What, are you writing

in English?’ (7); he is, to his penfriend in Budapest, but he

later complains that ‘It really gets on my wick when people

speak English. Sounds so bloody corny’ (18). Nevertheless,

Owing to some printing error on my astrological chart, I

ended up in the English Department for half a semester.

To be or not to be. Never really understood that

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phrase. Maybe those two stoned winters I had. To buy

or not to buy? Is Lolla bi?

(68)

And when he kisses Lolla he thinks ‘I guess she’s thinking

what I’m thinking, and maybe in English too: “Maybe not the

right thing to do”’ (125), as if English represented the

superego. In the film, this interest is taken even further

because the Icelandic Lolla of the book becomes ‘Lola

Milagros’, from Spain (played by Victoria Abril), who is

teaching Hlynur’s mother flamenco, and as a result all scenes

with her are in English. This was undoubtedly a wise choice,

since it added an international dimension to a film which

might otherwise have struggled to command any interest at all

outside Iceland: as Kormákur observed in an interview

promoting the film, ‘Just because I was born on the island

doesn’t mean I want to spend the rest of my life telling

stories for 300,000 people ... Britain is where I want to do

well’ (Leigh), something in which he echoes his own hero in

The Sea, Ágúst, who when asked to define Iceland, says ‘My

sister was abused before her first communion’. Ágúst’s

father’s second wife was the sister of his first; Ágúst

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himself sleeps with her daughter, who is, it transpires, his

own half-sister, while his appalled pregnant French

girlfriend (Hélène de Fougerolles) looks on throughout,

helpless and uncomprehending (like Lola, her foreignness

provides the excuse for some of the dialogue to be in

English). At the close, the fish factory, emblem of the

Icelandic economy, goes up in flames, though Ágúst succeeds

in escaping from Iceland, presumably forever.

The decision to avoid pitching his film as specifically

Icelandic may too have been influenced by the fact that

Kormákur’s own father is Spanish, enabling the film to have

an element of personal investment rather than simply of

‘translation’ of the novel, a point Kormákur himself made in

a separate interview:

MCN (Movie City News): The non-Nordic women in your

films – Abril and Hélène de Fougerolles, in The Sea –

stick out like a sore thumb in Iceland.

BK: Yes, they really stand out. I’m half Spanish. My

father is Catalon [sic], from Barcelona.

(Kormákur)

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Indeed this element of personal investment is taken so far

that in many ways the film erases mention not only of Hamlet

or of Laxness, but also of the original book of 101 Reykjavik

itself. Not only is there the question of the imported

Spanishness, but in an interview he gave to promote the film,

Kormákur was asked if the film was autobiographical. Never

even mentioning Helgason’s original book, he answered the

question unhesitatingly in terms of himself: ‘Oh, it’s about

me. Sure’ (Leigh). He went on to say ‘I’m not trying to

tell the Icelandic story ... This is the story of a man.

It’s not the story of a country’. For a director who sees

the film as his ticket out of Reykjavik, it is clearly not

surprising that this should be of little interest – and yet

to tell the Icelandic story could indeed be said to be one of

the projects of the novel, with its sense of progression from

874 to 1944, and it finds the originally Icelandic narrative

of Hamlet a very useful means through which to do so.

Helgason’s original novel may make a stand at the end against

the full pessimism of Hamlet and forecast a brighter future

for its hero and by extension for Iceland, but it does so

from a position of knowledge and of weighing of the evidence.

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By eliminating this layer of allusion and implication,

Kormákur may appear to make his ending still more optimistic,

but he also robs it of root and resonance: to have a

Hamletesque hero who cannot hear the allusion himself is

ironic, but to strip that allusion away entirely is to

diminish the imaginative power and range of the work. In 101

Reykjavik, then, we have a largely Icelandic-language film by

an Icelandic director about a character who has proved

crucial to the processes of Icelandic identity formation, yet

the discourse in which it tries hardest to position itself is

that of world cinema, with the surest index of that attempt

being its silencing of the story of Hamlet.

Works Cited

Gollancz, Israel. Hamlet in Iceland. London: David Nutt, 1898.

Hansen, William F., ed. and trans. Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of

Hamlet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Helgason, Hallgrímur. 101 Reykjavik. Trans. Brian Fitzgibbon.

London: Faber & Faber, 2002.

Kormákur, Baltasar. Interview. Movie City News, 27 May 2003.

Online: http://www.moviecitynews.com/Interviews/kormakur.html

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Laxness, Halldór. Independent People. [1934-5] Trans. J. A.

Thompson. London: the Harvill Press, 2001.

Leigh, Danny. ‘Fantasy Iceland’. The Guardian, 25 May 2001.

Malm, Mats. ‘The Nordic demand for Medieval Icelandic

manuscripts’. In The Manuscripts of Iceland. Eds. Gisli

Sigurdsson and Vésteinn Ólason. Reykjavik: Arni Magnusson

Institute, 2004. 101-107.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London:

Methuen, 1982.

Sturluson, Snorri. King Harald’s Saga. In Heimskringla. Trans.

Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1966.

Tulinius, Torfi. ‘Is Snorri godi an Icelandic Hamlet: On Dead

Fathers and Problematic Chieftainship in Eybryggja saga’.

Paper, 13th International Saga Conference, Durham, 2006.

Online: http://www.dur.ac.uk/medieval.www/sagaconf/torfi.htm

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