Trolls' Cathedral (1992)

1992

278 pages

Fiction

Trolls' Cathedral (1992)

Sigurbjorn is an architect with big dreams. In the spring of 1953, he is busy planning Iceland’s first department store. However, when the structure is finished and the store is about to open, his 12-year old son is lured inside by a stranger, beaten and sexually assaulted.

This work chronicles how this devastating event acts like a cancer on the lives of those it touches. Sigurbjorn’s world disintegrates with gathering speed as he questions his faith, his friendships and his marriage. Then, having lost his business, he plummets into the abyss of mental breakdown.

With his highly acclaimed trilogy Trolls’ Cathedral (1992), Potter’s Field (1996) and Winter Journey (1999), Olafur Gunnarsson has earned a place among the major realists in Icelandic letters.

R E V I E W S

Reviews

A homespun picture of Icelandic life in flux is the result, tradition falling prey to modernity, values in chaos … the characters emerge with clarity to serve a theme both grand and simple.

Mail on Sunday

One reads this novel with intense emotional involvement and a feeling of awe.

Sophia Willems, Westdeutsche Zeitung

A dramatic family saga! Olafur Gunnarsson describes Iceland’s journey towards modernity in a perfectly unsparing, eloquent and, at the same time, accessible style!

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

The thrill of this great novel lies in the tension between two different poles: the egocentric personality of the father and the lost personality of the son.

Berliner Zeitung

This skillfully plotted Icelandic novel portrays the conflicts that first energize and then threaten to destroy a Reykjavik family. Architect Sigurbjorn Helgason's visionary dreams of cathedral-building clash both amusingly and painfully with the more mundane yearnings that absorb his wife and three children--and when Sigurbjorn's youngest son is arbitrarily victimized, the once self-assured Helgasons are all afflicted in a way that may remind readers of Joyce Carol Oates's recent novel We Were the Mulvaneys. A fine book (first published in 1992), and a welcome English-language debut by the talented Gunnarsson.

Kirkus Reviews

A close cousin to Ibsen’s Master Builder.

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