Swiss based in Iceland, Joachim B. Schmidt delivers his second salvo of the adventures of a simple-minded young man, self-proclaimed sheriff, this time confronted with Trumpist America and the Cold War. Between fanciful fable and political warning.
Kalmann Óðinsson lists, annoyed: “Retarded, idiot, gogol, cripple, imbecile, moron, stupid, moron, simpleton, idiot.” There is a choice, to insult him – he also has the right to “disabled”, currently uttered by an old, shark-eyed American armed with a Glock. But Kalmann will prove that he has resources. That he deserves his self-proclamation as “sheriff”, admitted by his village of Raufarhöfn, where his cowboy hat is part of the landscape. He even became an international celebrity after he was seen on the news among the Capitol invaders, just before the FBI arrested him and sent him back to Iceland. It was also a lovely agent who told him that his beloved grandfather, who had started speaking Russian just before his death, was a spy. What ? But then the old man could well have been murdered, in his retirement home, says Noi, Kalmann's great friend. These two only know each other through screens but understand each other five out of five. Noi also excels in punchlines, like “Family relationships are more complex than an Eminem song” or “I’m calm as a penguin’s balls.” This whole affair will end in a huge fireworks display on a mountain where the Americans installed a radar station when they occupied Iceland – from 1941 to 1947, before obtaining the right to station troops there as part of of NATO and finally withdrawing from it in 2006. Pan! as Kalmann would say, who also likes “Rightworld”, expression borrowed from Happy Days. Kalmann loves American TV series.
Antihero hunter and fisherman
Kezako? This mess is the plot of the second salvo in the adventures of this sweet crazy character imagined by Joachim B. Schmidt, a Swiss author (German-speaking) who left to live in Iceland in 2007. The first, staypublished in 2023, had everything of a divine surprise: a completely atypical thriller, led in the first person by this hunter and fisherman antihero, unwilling witness to a murder. Between an epiphany provided by nature and the mazes of the investigation against the backdrop of a crisis in the fishing sector with quota wars and the end of ancestral solidarity, Schmidt managed to stand out even though the production of Nordic novels abounds and does not nothing exotic anymore.
Kalmann and the sleeping mountain surprises less, obviously. Because we already know Kalmann, his poetic strangeness, his reflections as if they fell from the moon but often very relevant, his anxieties, his intuition, his dangerousness too. The fact remains that Joachim B. Schmidt is still remarkably at one with him. By deterritorializing it, in particular. Schmidt sent him to the United States to meet, at more than 30 years old, his father, who was already married and a father when he met his mother in Iceland. Everything is going very well in Mill Creek, seen through the eyes of the candid: everyone is adorable, Kalmann is showered with love and gifts, and he likes handling weapons with his father and uncle Bucky, as does preparing bombs. It is with great pleasure that he leaves with his entire family for Washington DC to “write history”, where he proudly carries his sign which displays the “Q” of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy movement. The atmosphere is nice, united, a pseudo-Viking with a plastic helmet kindly picks him up when the crowd almost tramples him. But suddenly Kalmann loses his hat, and his family. They entered the Capitol. There's panic, he's frozen, incapable of reacting, and that's when the FBI appears.
Iceland, United States, politics, geopolitics, radicalization, family, mourning, double life, lies, love, friendship, Covid, pollution, place of disability in society… Joachim B. Schmidt stirs up a lot, sometimes too much. But his writing is agile, luminous, and Kalmann and the sleeping mountain proves, if necessary, how protean the noir novel is.
