Narrator (2015)

...the Aristotelian plot ... is interesting and skilfully interwoven with other more haunting ideas about storytelling and life ... The story may be both complicated and short, yet the way it’s constructed is extremely effective. Somehow there are no loose ends, and the characterisation holds up in every way despite, or perhaps because of, the complex play with the narrative.

Thinking about the form and shape of “Narrator,” I was reminded of the forms and shapes of those classic surrealist novels — André Breton’s “Nadja,” Philippe Soupault’s “Last Nights of Paris,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Her,” and others — in which narrators always end up obsessively following an entrancing figure around a city to strange, silly and tragic effect. Here, though, instead of the figure pursued being an object of sexual desire, as is the case in those surrealist novels, Aron is an object of sexual jealousy in “Narrator,” a perpetual reminder of G.’s inadequacy in love and, more deeply, in life. The book is also a descendant of the nouveau roman, taking formal cues from and shaping its particular version of narrative play in the mold of the enigmatic novels of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute. The world of “Narrator” is the same uncanny world of his previous novels. Characters from one Ólafsson book often appear again as characters in another. His literary influences also seem to flow freely from one book to the next. The Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett influences, which are prominent in previous work like “The Pets,” remain, though they are perhaps less pronounced here than the surrealist and nouveau roman touchstones. … Ólafsson does manage to take the reader on a compelling journey into the tragicomic world that erupts from man’s inability to adequately process shame and the inevitable narcissism that flows from that ineptitude. … Each and every day we are the narrators of our own stories — analyzing our actions, explaining our feelings, translating our experiences, to ourselves and to the world. With rare exception, we cast ourselves as the tragic heroes of the stories of our lives, as G. does here. Ironically, because all narrators — yes, even you, even me — are inherently unreliable, this role of tragic hero becomes more accurate than we are ever able to comprehend. “I wonder how I look in the eyes of the people walking past the screamingly huge window of the store?” G. ponders. Our tragedy is our inability to assess ourselves with anything approaching third-person objectivity, to see the people we truly are, to get a glimpse, even a fleeting one, of what others see. Luckily, our comedy, of course, is the same.