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
27
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
29
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
33
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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