Angels of the universe (Shad Thames books)

By Einar Már Guðmundsson

Book Overview

Set against the bleak landscape of Iceland, a story of madness unfolds as Paul describes growing up in a working-class family and his frequent retreat into his own fantasy world, which eventually... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 189919715X
• ISBN13: 9781899197156
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Mare's Nest Publishing
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great book.

I won't go into the basics of this book since most of the other reviews have done that. What I'd like to add is how well the author balances and tangles the tragic and the humor together, which is rare to see done so well in modern literature. Also how the writing style seems minimalistic in many ways but then there come highly poetic parts out of nowhere, which makes the poetic parts so much better than when authors are trying to make every sentence into something poetical and it just gets boring. I also would like to add, for those of you who are interested, that you can (or atleast could) get a copy of the film from www.skifan.is, it's an Icelandic store. The film is great and Paul is portrayed brilliantly by the main actor. I just have a hard time wondering why the book/film didn't get more attention.

Another excellent novel from this small country

Iceland has one of the highest rates of literacy in the world and it shows. This book is one of the great results of that... it's one of the best books I've read on psychological breakdown and manages to avoid many of the cliches in that field. While it does sail close to the pretentious at points, it avoids going over that edge, and raises some serious social points.There's some great social commentary in this book... about Dagny the rebellious bourgeois girlfriend of the "hero", NATO, the way we can treat the mentally ill much like criminals, society-as-a-whole's own insanity... and as one reviewer has already quoted that key line "The madhouse is in a lot of places"*. Our society is completely hypocritical about madness. This book doesn't feel like a translation to read.The film is excellent too, but since it isn't in English, will be overlooked sadly. :(* I wonder in fact if Arthur Koestler's (non-fiction) "The Ghost in the Machine" has influenced this book. Certainly some key ideas seem to be common to both of them.

GREAT -- BUT CHILLING -- PORTRAIT OF INSANITY

Einar Mar Gudmundsson's short but rich novel is dark, but it is not without humor -- and that's a good thing, since it's an 'inside' look at a young man slowly losing his grip on reality. He experiences paranoia and hallucinations, experiments with drugs, and is suffering from severe depression. He has his lighter moments -- in fact, he's an intelligent and lucid person much of the time -- but the weight of his madness slowly drags him further and further down.The humor in the book comes in the form of some of his friends -- fellow-inmates at the Klepp Psychiatric Institute in Rekjavik. His portraits of some of the doctors, orderlies -- and police -- that he encounters will bring a smile to the reader as well.The author is obviously pretty sensitive to the plight and conditions in which people suffering from mental illness live -- his characters, while embodying much humor, never come across as charicatures, but as real human beings. I've read that this novel has been (or is being) made into a film in Iceland -- like another reviewer below, I strongly hope that it makes it to the States. I'd love to see a well-made screen version -- I hope that the author has a great deal of control over it, to keep it true to the spirit of this enlightening and compelling novel.

An Exalted book

A must to have, plus,, the movie is out it's a pure combo!

Perfict in every way

I read this book with an open mind. That's the only way you can read it, becuse it deals with a touchy subject. Gudmundsson tells the tale of a man that suffers from schizophrenia. He tells of the youth and teenage years of this man, all the while, the disease is building. And later it destroys this man's life. How does the man's family react and how does he live through this pain and trouble ?? This is a book about one of the hidden diseases in the world.