65 – Iceland – Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir – Hotel Silence (Score 6.15)

Jonas is arranging to get a tattoo of a flower round his nipple. His mother is in a care home. His neighbour is Svanur. Jonas is no spring chicken.

Jonas seems to be intent on killing himself and borrows a shotgun, but forgets(?) about cartridges. He searches the internet for countries at war to find a suitably dangerous one where he could be killed.

Our “hero” flies to a city which has been all but destroyed in a war, but has developers who have come to reconstruct it. Although he can’t understand the taxi driver (and vice versa) they both speak English. They arrive at Hotel Silence which seems to have survived the war fairly well.

The section of the book set in Iceland is boring, but it becomes a bit more interesting when he arrives in the war zone and begins to interact with other people. Unfortunately this does not last.

He finds himself doing odd-jobs for assorted people, the jobs becoming more and more complicated. Unfortunately all this did not make the rest of the book much more interesting than the boring bit at the beginning. At least he gets his tattoo.

I gave the book a score of four.