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This
appeared in 8/11/06’s Salon.com:
"Icelander"
This
wonderful new novel from McSweeney's
is a twisty murder mystery with rich overtones of Nabokov, Norse
mythology and
pomo fiction.
By Laura Miller
Aug.
11,
2006 | At one point in Dustin Long's endearingly wacky puzzle novel,
"Icelander," two "metaphysical detectives" discover a copy
of "The Case of the Consternated Cossacks" on a bookshelf between
Herman Melville's "The Confidence Man" and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
"Valley of Fear." Since this bumbling pair, a kind of existential
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, see everything as a clue, they have no
doubt that
the book's placement is significant, but as usual they just can't
figure out
what the significance is. At this juncture, the novel's "editor"
intrudes. In a cranky footnote he observes that there would be equal
meaning
embedded in the fact that the books placed just above and under "The
Case
of the Consternated Cossacks" are by, say, Vladimir Nabokov and
Elizabeth Peters
(who, to the uninitiated, writes mystery novels about a sleuthing
female
Egyptologist). You see, the books have been shelved by "the most
ingenious
library scientist of modern times," whose plan for a nonlinear
"rhizomatic replacement of the Dewey Decimal System" entails sorting
books without hierarchy, according to an "infinite skein of
interconnections."
[. . .]
If
you
can't already tell from the name of our murder victim that
"Icelander" is a giddy sendup of postmodern fiction in all its
referential frenzy, bear in mind that Magnus Valison, before writing
his Emily
Bean books, also produced two novels titled "Itallo" and "Ripe
Leaf," which if you work the anagrams pegs him as a Nabokov stand-in.
Then
there's the Hollywood heartthrob and
wannabe
novelist, Nathan, who has come to town to celebrate Bean Day. And we
haven't
even gotten to the Norse mythology yet, from the underground realm,
Vanaheim,
that Emily and Jon discovered in Iceland, to the shape-shifting fox
warriors
who can be glimpsed skulking all over town. Our Heroine was married to
the
hereditary prince of Vanaheim, but he has recently left her to return
to his
people.
[.
. . ]