Called Home

by Agnar Þórðarson, Robert Kellog (Translator)

The story of Andri, a young man coming of age, is set against the background of the major volcanic eruption in the Westman Islands off the south coast of Iceland in 1973. By the end of the novel, passion, first love, horror, and discovery have left few things in Andri's life as they had once seemed to be. Remarkably, however, Thordarson's contemporary romance plays out in a convincingly realistic world. ""In Iceland, Agnar Thordarson is perhaps best known as a playwright since thirty of his plays have been performed on stage, radio and television...The story of Called Home is told in a way reminding us of the author's mastery of dramatic technique...The telling has the immediacy and objectivity of a stage play, with a steadily focused, slightly comic and satiric, fictional world continually before our mind's eye."" from the introduction by Robert Kellogg.

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book takes place on the Westman Islands of Iceland after a volcanic eruption that took place in 1973. The events of the eruption and its consequences both for the island and the islanders are told in realistic detail, filtered through the eyes of a young man, his friends, his mother and her friends. The description of the physical violence of the eruption is gripping. When we were in Iceland we saw a movie about this volcanic eruption and the Island's recovery that increased my interest in this book.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Called Home is a tonally subdued novel about a 1973 volcanic eruption on the island of Heimaey off the southern coast of Iceland. The book has a slow-build momentum, and yet it also has a very solid dramatic arc and is compulsively readable, with many chapters built largely from one- and two-sentence paragraphs (I read the bulk of the novel in two sittings). There's a dash of Icelandic mysticism and a handful of perversity, both of which serve to connect the story with the legacy of the sagas. How strange, too, to see a community try and battle a volcanic eruption as though it were a manageable nuisance--as though it were something on the order of a "pretty severe" flood. And Thordarson does a fine job of re-creating that period in world history, employing a relatively light touch in references to the Vietnam War, the international fishing waters dispute between Iceland and Britain known as the Cod War, and the activities of Germany's Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. Finally, there are these wonderful lines that surprise you now and again--such as the following, when the protagonist confronts his mother over a dark secret she has been keeping from him. She says: "Yes, you are right to blame me, condemn me for being so pliable, but I did not create myself." How wonderfully bizarre!