Restoration by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson

Restoration by Olafur Johann Olafsson
Although I read this book in Icelandic I have learned that the translated version (Translation by Vicky Cribb) is extremely well executed.
This is definitely one of Olafsson’s best novel. I have read all of his books, including his early publishing of short stories and I sense that Olafsson (which is a one of Time Warner’s CEO’s) is a growing author.
What I find the most fascinating about this story is the slow build up of exhilaration and the relationship between the main characters Alice and Kristín which is well orchestrated and definitely gives the story an amplitude.

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From the Publisher:

“A tremendous talent.”
-Boston Globe

“Restoration is an elegantly constructed work of fiction, seamlessly moving between the past and the present.”
-Ron Rash, bestselling author of Serena

Acclaimed novelist Olaf Olafsson brings us Restoration, a sweeping story of love tested by human frailty and the terrors and tragedies of war. Departing from the landscapes of his native Iceland-so beautifully evoked in Absolution, The Journey Home, and other previous works-Olafson sets Restoration in the gorgeous Italian hills of Tuscany during the World War Two years of the early 1940s. He captivates readers with a deeply emotional story in the vein of The English Patient by Michael Ondaajte, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and other contemporary literary classics, spinning a tale of passion, art, war, and betrayal centered around a pair of love triangles and a forged Caravaggio.

Book Description
A searing novel of love and war, betrayal and redemption.

Having grown up in an exclusive circle of wealthy British ex-pats in Florence in the 1920s, Alice Orsini shocks everyone when she marries the son of a minor Italian landowner and begins restoring San Martino, a crumbling villa in Tuscany, to its former glory. But after years of hard work, filling the acres with orchards, livestock, and farmhands, Alice’s growing restlessness pulls her into the heady social swirl of wartime Rome and a reckless affair that will have devastating consequences.

Her indiscretion is noticed by careful eyes-those of Robert Marshall, a renowned dealer of renaissance art. In exchange for his silence, he demands Alice hide a priceless Caravaggio, a national treasure that he has sold to the Germans, at San Martino. As the front creeps toward Tuscany, sending a wave of orphans, refugees, and wounded Allies to San Martino, Alice trusts that the painting she’s hiding will keep the Germans at bay. What she doesn’t know is the truth about a brilliant young artist she harbors named Kristín, a prodigy who can restore any painting, and whose secrets may ruin them all.

Trapped between loyalists and resistors, cruel German forces and Allied troops, Alice and Kristín must withstand the destruction of everything around them while painfully confronting the consequences of their past mistakes.

In this sweeping story of passion and betrayal, Olafsson works his profound magic once again, creating a novel that grapples with the moral abyss of war while rendering the psychological portraits of those living through it with masterful strokes.-

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Interesting reading experiment in an Icelandic elementary school

Recently The National Centre for Educational Materials launched (NCED) an interesting experiment in a partnership with my old school Vogaskoli . All the children in the school  were given an Amazon Kindle to use for their studies. The (NCED) plan to publish some teaching materials on an electronic format for Kindle and other reading devices. Is this a step towards the inevitable evolution of elimination of books as we know them today? Will this lead to more literacy among children in the world? I am just wondering.

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Volcano!: The Icelandic Eruption of 2010 and Other Hot, Smoky, Fierce, and Fiery Mountains

True-life accounts from a wide variety of people, including scientists, sightseers, and thrillseekers, add to the compelling readability of this book that gives readers both a historical perspective on the human experience of volcanoes and a scientific perspective on why they occur and what scientists are doing to help people stay out of the way.

The 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull were volcanic events at Eyjafjöll in Iceland which, although relatively small for volcanic eruptions, caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe over an initial period of six days in April 2010. Additional localised disruption continued into May 2010. The eruption was declared officially over in October 2010, when snow on the glacier did not melt. From 14-20 April, ash covered large areas of northern Europe when the volcano erupted. About 20 countries closed their airspace (a condition known as ATC Zero) and it affected hundreds of thousands of travellers. The grounding of European flights avoided about 344×106 kg of CO2 emissions per day, while the volcano emitted about 150×106 kg of CO2 per day.[1]
Seismic activity started at the end of 2009 and gradually increased in intensity until on 20 March 2010, a small eruption started rated as a 1 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

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Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason

The book Ashes to Dust is one of the best thrillers Yrsa Sigurdardottir has written and was named One of the Year’s Top Ten Crime Books in the UK…

A Masterwork of Suspense from “Iceland’s Crime Queen” (The Scotsman)

Icelandic volcanic explosion provides a timely background for the latest fictional adventure of Thora Gudmundsdottir, a Reykjavik granny and lawyer. In 1973 one of the Westman Islands was buried under showers of red-hot ash and lava. The islanders were evacuated just in time, and now a survivor comes to Thora wanting to prevent a planned excavation of this Nordic Pompeii.
Not surprisingly, for in the basement of his former home are discovered human remains just as nasty as anything in Pompeii and a lot fresher: three bodies plus a spare head in a box. Thora is persuaded to leave Reykjavik for the islands to support her client, a spotty teenager at the time of the explosion but now possibly in line for a quadruple murder charge.

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Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason  is a mesmerizing international thriller that sweeps from modern Iceland to Nazi Germany. In 1945, a German bomber crash-lands in Iceland durign a blizzard. Puzzlingly, there are both German and American officers on board. One of the senior German officers claims that their best chance of survival is to try to walk to the nearest farm. He sets off, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, only to disappear into the white vastness.

Flash forward to the present. The U.S. Army is clandestinely trying to remove the wreck of an airplane from an Icelandic glacier. A young Icelander, Elias, inadvertently stumbles upon the excavation and then promptly disappears. Before he vanishes, though, he manages to contact his sister, Kristin. She embarks on a thrilling and perilous adventure, determined to discover the truth of her brother’s fate. Kristin must solve the riddle of Operation Napoleon, even if it means losing her own life.

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The Colors of The Icelandic Horse

The Colors of The Icelandic Horse

The glorious range of colours of the Icelandic horse is a unique treasure that horse breeders have been given the privilege of maintaining and fostering. Horse lovers often have problems when it comes to defining colours and variations of colours correctly, not to mention understanding the genetics of horse colours. This book finally meets the needs of horse lovers for a clear, detailed and overall review of all the colours and nuances of the Icelandic horse. The author, Friðþjófur Þorkelsson, has worked for decades with exceptional diligence and patience to photograph all the colours and nuances that are known. This is a herculean task, as few horse breeds display as many varieties of colour as the Icelandic horse. Rare varieties are given particular attention, and the development of colour is traced from a foal to an adult horse, which is invaluable for all who want to figure out the eventual colours of foals. Ágúst Sigurðsson, Director of the Agricultural University of Iceland, wrote the preface while biologist, Dr. Anne Phaff Ussing, author of books and articles on horse colours and the genetics behind them, provided scientific advice.

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Last Days of the Arctic

LAST DAYS OF THE ARCTIC is a document of the disappearing arctic life in Greenland. But not only. It is a photography book from one of the most talented young photographers of Iceland. Ragnar Axelsson, usually called RAX, works for the biggest newspaper of Iceland, the Morgunbladid. His pictures appear there day after day. That is what makes his living. But as a lot of photographers, he is not very happy with those pictures. So, he is exploring a less commercial kind of photography. His personal work was presented to the large public in his first book “Faces of the North”, with pictures from Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. A first publication, a master publication. A must have for a passionate of photography.
I his new book, Rax is exploring especially the north of Greenland, where most of the tourist never go. It is far, expensive, difficult of approach and also dangerous. The blizzard can arrive in a few minutes and then you are lost, if you don’t know how to survive in those extreme conditions. The cold is THE big problem. When your whole body is freezing, the wind blowing, the snow cutting your face and hands like rasor blades, when your eyes are crying, try to make a picture, or just think of the effort it needs to take out the camera and shoot. Try to imagine how comfortable it is, in those conditions, to change the film in the camera, with no feeling in your frozen fingers. For having experienced these conditions myself, I know how difficult it is to make THE good picture then. And Rax does it, picture after picture. The entire book brings you there, in this gigantic and unspoiled place. He brings you close to the people, in the houses, with the seal and white bear hunters, there where the earth ends. And all the pictures are strong, telling a story. They are pictures of freedom but also pictures of a very hard life. It is a document, but it is also a masterpiece of photograpy. It is an enchanting jouney to a place where you will never go. In black and white or in colour Rax shows you the life like it is today, before the icecap is melting. A must have book, belonging definitely to the 20 best books of photography.

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A Stolen Life

A Stolen Life eftir Jaycee Dugard. Útgefið af Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing í júlí 2011. ISBN: 9781451629187

„Sumarið 1991 var ég bara venjulegur krakki. Ég gerði bara venjulega hluti eins og flestir krakkar gera. Ég átti vini og móður sem elskuðu mig. Ég var bara eins og þú þar til lífi mínu var stolið. Í átján ár var ég fangi. Ég var bara hlutur sem aðrir notuðu og misnotuðu. Í átján ár fékk ég ekki að nota nafnið sem mér var gefið. Ég varð sjálf móðir og var þvinguð til þess að verða systir. Í átján ár lifði ég af hræðilegar aðstæður. Þann 26. ágúst árið 2009 fékk ég að nota nafnið mitt aftur. Ég heiti Jaycee Lee Dugard. Mér finnst ég ekki vera fórnarlamb. Ég lifði þetta af. A Stolen Life er mín saga, með mínum eigin orðum sögð með mínum hætti nákvæmlega eins og ég man það“.

Jaycee var haldið fanginni í afgirtu svæði á baklóð kvalara sinna. Hún eignaðist tvær dætur sem voru 11 og 15 ára um það leiti sem hún var frelsuð.

Lesning bókarinnar A Stolen Life er átakanleg. En það er þess virði að lesa í gegnum þessa einlægu frásögn konu sem mátt hefur þola misþyrmingar af hendi fólks sem lifðu í samfélagi löghlýðinna borgara. Málið vakti mikla athygli á sínum tíma og varð tilefni greinaskrifa í helstu dagblöðum Bandaríkjanna. Sjá nánar á Wikipedia

Phillip Craig Garrido hlaut 431 árs fangelsisdóm fyrir illskuverk sín og kona hans Nancy hlaut 36 ára dóm.

Stofnuð hafa verið stuðningssamtök fyrir fjölskyldur þeirra sem orðið hafa fyrir mannráni barna. Sjá nánar á http://thejaycfoundation.org/

Erlendir ritdómar

I am still speechless, undeniable exhibition of strength

I have never written a book review…frankly, I haven’t sat thru a book and read it cover to cover since college (which is embarrasing to admit, but it is the truth). However, something pulled me towards this book and her story since she was discovered in 2009. It took me less than a day to read this book and I too had a hard time putting it down. The first 1/4 of the book is very, very difficult to get thru in one sitting. I found myself having to put it down several times as the raw emotion you will feel is overwhelming. You can’t help but put yourself in her experience as well as thinking of what you would do if other loved ones in your family had been abducted and thrust into this life. For me, it was my 4 year old niece…the thought of a sicko taking her and doing this to her was truely painful to fathom. I am Jaycee’s age and I think that also played a part in my experience with this book. She mentions several times the feelings of “missing out” on certain milestones in life and it really makes you appreciate all those things in your life that may not of worked out “perfectly”, but yet you are still afforded those experiences…these experiences Jaycee never had. The down to earth perspective this young woman has is heroic. Yes, she speaks often of animals and as a none animal lover, this did not bother me. Jaycee takes you back to the mind of an 11 year old and progresses you to her present age. It is impressive given her 5th grade education. I am glad she did not use a ghost writer, I believe her message would of been skewed. She writes this book as if you are in her shoes and that is what makes it so incrediably powerful. My heart was broken for her for much of the book, but in the end she turns this into a true miracle of strength and dare I say it, a happy ending. Which I found to be impossible when I began to read it. The biggest message I took from this book is we are all dealt a hand in life, sometimes fair, sometimes not fair… and it’s not the hand we are dealth that matters, but how we handle it. I will never forget her story. Ever.

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Show of support

I too watched the interview with Diane Sawyer, and will buy the book to help support this amazing young woman. What no-one has commented on is that without a very strong foundation for her 11 years before her kidnapping; things may have turned out different for Jaycee. Her mother is to be credited with giving her the tools & foundation & strength to survive and find her way home.