Gudbergur Bergsson is a critical figure in postwar Icelandic literature. An extremely prolific author, he has published more than twenty novels as well as autobiographical works, short-story collections, children's books, and many articles in various magazines and newspapers, both literary and nonliterary. He is also the major translator of both classical and modern Spanish and Portuguese literature in Iceland. In his works he has developed his own concepts of life and art as well as distinctive literary aesthetics, in which imagination, fantasy, and the absurd are given great attention. His works can be characterized as innovative and progressive. He is preoccupied with Icelandic reality, both social and individual, and interprets it in a fresh and original way. His nontraditional view of Iceland has in the past shocked many readers, and he has therefore been considered a controversial author. As a writer concerned with the present, he displays an...