Iceland by Jim Krusoe

 


Oddball squared.

Iceland is Jim Krusoe's first novel published back in 2002 when Jim was age fifty-eight. Jim went on to write five more novels, all equally wacky and off-the-wall - Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You, Parsifal, The Sleep Garden.

A Jim Krusoe novel is like a Coen brothers film or short-stories from Richard Ford's Rock Springs, only with Jim, we're talking even more out-there flaky.

Personally, I gobble up this type of fiction. I wish Jim started his novel wring earlier and wrote twelve novels rather than just six.

Jim Krusoe told an interviewer: " I suppose that I’m what Charles Baxter calls an Unrealist, and my own unreality is based in the logic of dreams. Dreams are never surreal—at least mine aren’t—but neither are they just sitting down to eat a burger and fries. A dream, when I think about it the next day, may seem strange, but while I’m dreaming, I always believe it. I’d like my fiction to remind readers not only of their daily lives, but of the lives they could have, and maybe do have, lying in wait."

Speaking of unreality, on the first pages of Iceland, Paul, the tale's narrator, enters an institute to pick out an organ that will restore him to heath. Paul never tells us exactly what organ - liver, bladder, kidney...who knows?

Anyway, to his surprise, this institute doesn't have men in white smocks and freezers, rather something more peculiar: all varieties of human internal organs - lungs, kidneys, livers, stomachs, intestines, pancreases , spleens - float and drift across an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Just then, Paul catches sight of the most beautiful woman he's ever seen in his life wearing scuba gear at the far end of the pool. The beauty introduces herself as Emily and apologies for being late for his appointment. Minutes later Paul and Emily strip down for a luscious round of lovemaking. A deep emotional bond is born.

And Paul the twenty-something typewriter repairman living in the small Midwestern city of St. Nils develops a number of other relationships throughout the novel but Emily is never far from his mind and heart.

If a director ever turned Iceland into a film, a few clips from the trailer could feature Paul becoming friends with a burly rug cleaner by the name of Leo, Paul and Leo traveling to Iceland and venturing too close to an active volcano, Paul trekking up an Icelandic mountain only to get caught in an avalanche.

This to say there's plenty of action but, and here's the Jim Krusoe rub: quirkiness and weirdness provide the tenor for the entire tale as Paul, a completely likeable kind of guy, provides a running philosophic commentary on love and death, fate and freedom, dreams and our everyday knocking about as we deal with things like tragedy and grief and our occasional joys.

The novel's opening paragraph sets the tone: "I had been dying little by little and bit by bit, I thought. On some days I felt fine, as if the animal, or machine, or whatever I was at that moment could easily believe that the whole thing, this dying business, had been only a bad dream, although a waking one to be sure, which had somehow leaked into my mind while I was waiting at a street corner for a traffic light as all around me cars went about their business, their exhaust spewing into my lungs, their radios hurting my ears. But the catch was that they would continue doing this forever, and I would not."

Give Iceland a whirl. Chances are, you'll want to read more Jim Krusoe, a fresh voice on the American literary scene.


Jim Krusoe, born 1943