In Bed With Murakami

I am staying in an apartment insulated with books, printed in
Icelandic and in English. Novels, poetry, history, biography, art
and photography.

This is a literary society. Hallgrimskirkja,the church which is the
axis of the wheel that is 101 Reykjavik, is named after a poet. The
magic of language is respected here.

Disa loves books, devours books. She finished Murakami´s novel
today. South Of The Border, West Of The Sun. She wants to read another
one of his. She praises the clarity of his sentences after reading to me
a passage from the novel describing a married man´s loneliness while
making love with his wife.

I read her one of Sandra Birdsell´s Agassiz Stories almost every night
before we draw the blinds and close out the midnight sun. She read
Raymond Carver´s selected short stories, Where I´m Calling From, in
two shifts. "I had to take a break," she said, "because they were so sad."
She read Atwood´s Alias Grace in a couple of days, and now it´s Llosa,
a series of articles first written for a Spanish newspaper column.

Disa´s got a librarian´s knowledge of Icelandic writers, but is reading
only English texts while I´m here in order to take advantage of the
opportunity to discuss them with me. There are a few English words
and vernacular sayings which elude her - coulee one of the former,
kick the bucket one of the latter - but when it comes to grasping the layers
of meaning a writer offers, her receptivity and understanding leave my
own gasping.

Today was sun and high winds. A long walk along the trails by the
Atlantic Ocean, past a place where students grow and tend their summer
gardens. Farther down the coast there´s a golf course. We stop to watch
a threesome - two men and a young woman - play a par four. The men
both find the rough, while the woman hits it straight down the middle.
Their second shots are both muffs, while she lands her long iron 35 feet
from the flag. She waits while they both miss the green with their third
shots, then chip on in four. She lines up her birdie putt, calmly addresses
the ball and drops it in the center of the cup. The men two-putt for sixes.

Later, back home, it´s haddock in ginger sauce, with linguine in cream
and a simple tomato salad. After dinner, she rides off on her bike to visit
a cousin who just got back from holidays, and I go for a walk downtown
to poke around the nooks and alleyways to take a few photos. On my way
back along Laugavegur, the bookstores are open late so I go into one, get
an espresso, and check the shelves to see which of the other Murakami
novels they have in stock.

DL