"The Flatey Enigma"

The historic church on Flatey Island.

The Flatey Enigma by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson is a very strange mystery novel. The setting is the Icelandic island called Flatey, which is a very small island in Breiðafjörður Bay in the northeast of the country. The novel was meaningful to me especially because I toured the small island on both of my recent visits to Iceland, in 2021 and 2022. 

The events in the novel take place in 1960, when the residents of Flatey lived a very different life than the summer visitors who now occupy the colorful houses and the only hotel on the island. Today, only one or two families still live there throughout the dark and very cold winters, but back then, as the author explains, the islanders lived a very challenging and different life -- I found this material to be the most interesting part of the novel.

A visitor to the island in 1960, as described by Ingolfsson, would find no rooms to rent and no restaurants. He could only ask for a bed and meals in a local household. The island’s inhabitants lived in rather cramped homes, and made a living from fishing, hunting, or raising animals, or by being employed by the government, for example as the operator of the generator-powered telephone exchange, which operated only a few hours each day. Some of the farmers raised cows, and shared the milk with people like the pastor of the church. They ate mutton from their sheep; they also ate fish and wild birds like puffins, wild birds' eggs, seal meat, dried fish, and in general, whatever they could eke out of the forbidding island and the even smaller nearby islands. A regularly scheduled ferryboat (still connecting Flatey to the mainland) brought visitors and also supplies from the mainland.

A key to the novel is a beautifully illustrated, hand-written medieval manuscript, called the Flatey Book, which was written and compiled by a scribe on Flatey in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. This manuscript, which in 1960 was in the Danish National Library in Copenhagen, contains the best and most complete text of several of the Icelandic sagas and other historic material. It was repatriated to the Icelandic national library in Reykjavik in 1971, and is still there. In Flatey in 1960, the library next to the church held a facsimile of the manuscript, which fascinated some of the characters.

Illustration from the Flatey Manuscript (source)

The novel begins with the discovery by seal-hunters of a dead man on one of the nearby islands. A rather large number of local people, plus one government lawyer who has just arrived expecting to work on some record-keeping, become involved in trying to identify the body and then to learn who killed him. What's unusual about this novel is that at the end of each chapter is a contrasting story of efforts to solve a riddle called "The Flatey Enigma," which is a few sheets of paper from the 19th century containing a set of mysterious hints. These papers had been tucked into the facsimile manuscript at some unknown time. Each chapter-end explains one of the 40 clues to the challenge, which is to complete a particular poem. Two main characters, who turn out to be scholars of medieval Icelandic literature, are engaged in a competition to solve this "enigma."  I don’t think any normal readers of the novel could possibly solve the enigma; I could scarcely understand the clues or even the solution. It makes for very strange reading! 

Houses on the island -- you can also see the nearby islands.

A lighthouse, visible on a neighboring island.

These girls were selling painted rocks to the tourists from the National Geographic Explorer,
which brought us to the island. They were enthusiastic about having their picture taken.

The Flatey Enigma is widely respected, and a spin-off was
a TV series that's actually a sequel to the novel's plot.

Flatey's inhabitants ate the foods that they could get from their environment, along with some imports brought in on the ferry boat. Here are a few quotes about food:

“Those are great black-backed gull eggs from the spring,” she said as he picked one up to examine it. “There’s no need to spare any of those eggs in these recipes. There’s plenty of them at this time of the year, and they’re fine for baking, even if they’re a bit old and have started to gestate,” she added. (p. 102)

“There’s no farming for them there, apart from their potato patch, but they go to Ketilsey and the skerries around there. They just about scrape by; it’s a long way to go, and there aren’t many eggs to be found. But they catch some seal and puffin there, too. They also do some line fishing and work at the fish factory when it’s in operation.” (p. 20)

“Ingibjörg received them with a ready dinner: boiled puffin breast with potatoes and a knob of butter.” (p. 47)

Finally, a description of the end of a meal that the hosts offered to the visitor:

"Lunch was now over in Flatey’s district officer’s home, and his wife placed a pot of coffee on the table. The men poured the boiling coffee into their empty glasses of water and snorted snuff. Kjartan also poured some coffee into his glass but declined Ingibjörg’s offer of sugar and milk. The men sipped the hot coffee, sighed, and burped." (p. 24).  

One of the characters in the novel is an alcoholic, and he drinks alcohol constantly, but the meals were always accompanied by plain water, and coffee (which obviously had to be imported on the ferry boat)! 

Most fun on the island: seeing puffins. I find it hard to imagine, but people still hunt and eat them.
One of the characters in the book complains because the tourists do nothing but gawk at puffins.

Blog post and photos © 2022 mae sander.

Mona Lisa Everywhere

It's easier to find Mona Lisa than to find Waldo, as I've known for many years of collecting a variety of appropriations, interpretations, and re-uses of her famous face. Here are a few of her recent appearances in a variety of websites (none of these are my original photos). Of course the original sites are likely to disappear from the web eventually, but I've saved the images.

On the side of a building in Paris

“The New Mona Lisa” on a building in the 13th arrondisement

In a Japanese Rice Paddy

From the Spoon and Tamago blog: "Seven different varieties of rice are planted in early June....
They take roughly 1 month to grow, slowly filling out and completing the artwork."

On the cover of the New Yorker

On an album cover at Spotify

Listen at this site: Spotify - Mona Lisa.

In NonFungibleToken Art (whatever that means)

This image is labeled "Auction Failed," so I guess no one wanted it.

From "Digital Artists Take On the Mona Lisa in New NFT Exhibit"

More of the usual parody images

From Singulart by Jamie Lee.

"Smile, Mona Lisa"

In a Bolivian art studio

Mona Lisa in traditional Cholita clothing.

Having a Glass of Wine

From Twitter

And in Brussels this summer

From an exhibit at the Comics Art Museum, Brussels.

This image collection assembled for mae’s food blog.

Paper Dolls for Today

 Searching online, I found copies of my favorite paper dolls from my childhood, and from other related vintage paper doll books. I'm thinking of them today, so here they are without much comment.

This is the paper doll book I had -- I cut out all the dolls & clothes.
The dolls are the figures on the cover. I do not remember the coloring book,
only the paper dolls and the magnificent clothing.

Needless to say, these were discarded many years ago.

Paper doll of Princess Elizabeth in 1939 -- obviously, I did not have this one!

Some cut-outs from the 1939 book.

Croissants

After several years of bread baking, Len decided to try the ultimate challenge: croissants!

A perfect square of butter on a square of dough.

The dough is rolled multiple times.

Shaping the croissant.

Total time from mixing until baking is complete: 24 hours.

Flaky layers! And they are delicious.

 Blog post and all photos © 2022 mae sander

Fun!

At the University of Michigan Museum of Art: “Fun.”

A giant tiger by Lucy Popovitch.

The inspiration.

This headrest has been among my favorites for a long time. I’m glad the artist chose it.

 

Photos from my visit to the art museum today, blog post © 2022 mae sander.

New: another tale of Bruno, Chief of Police

“Because nobody trusts the media these days, Bruno. It’s all fake news. It’s we say this and they say that. That’s their big win. Nobody knows what the truth is anymore. It’s Moscow’s revenge for the Cold War. We were the free world, remember, with the free media. And they were stuck with Pravda. Moscow’s propaganda was so rancid that even the Russians didn’t believe it. And now they’ve turned that upside down so we in the West don’t trust our own media anymore.” 

“Speak for yourself,” he replied. But his heart wasn’t in it. He recognized the dismaying amount of truth in what she was saying. All the torrents of social media were spreading like a virus, wide open to disinformation or to the paranoid fantasies of sad people. (To Kill a Troubadour, p. 269)

To Kill A Troubadour by Martin Walker is this summer's installment of the long and in my opinion wonderful series of books about Bruno, the chief of police in a small town in rural France. I love the way each one uses current international problems to create a new situation for Bruno.

The realities of life in our time, somewhere in the teens of the twenty-first century, weigh  on Bruno’s mind and affect even the idyllic atmosphere of his town. A tennis match, a concert featuring highly political Catalan separatists, a vicious ex-husband demanding parental rights for the children of one of Bruno’s best friends, and as always a bit about Bruno's dog and the horses he rides, as well as an encounter with his lost (but never forgotten) love Isabelle -- all share the action in this really readable installment in the series.

As usual in this series, the effective suspense that builds in this book is only equaled by the remarkable character of the inhabitants of the town, and by the splendid meals that Bruno and his friends prepare even while they are busy protecting the public from terrorists and engaging in dangerous missions to protect their values from attack. Bruno even competes in a tennis match while having conferences with the international police and while also managing to make a special meal for the organizers, to help roast a whole pig and a lamb for a village fête, as well as to treat his guests to his homemade venison pate, a friend's coronation chicken, gazpacho, pasta with tomato sauce, and much more. And drink lots of local wine.

Many of Walker's books feature an interest in some historic era and its implications for the novel. In this book, the composer of a song about Catalan independence features in the local concert and in the political controversy at the heart of the main plot. This character also writes about the influence of the Islamic rulers of Spain before the 15th century, and publishes his work on a series of well-crafted web pages. I really enjoyed reading the bits and pieces of this history as the characters, including Bruno, read and learn. It's an area which I've read quite a bit about but haven't given it much thought recently.

In this new work, Martin Walker continues to portray a lovable policeman, Bruno, who is fun to read about, adored by all the people and dogs in town, and for the reader, believable, at least as long as you are reading and not overthinking. I'm a fan! 

Will we finally get a Bruno Cookbook?

In the afterword, Walker mentions that a version of the Bruno cookbook, which up to now has been published only in German, will soon be published in English -- though I can find very little to convince me that this time, the publisher will really go through with it.

The Bruno books themselves recently include food descriptions that you could use as recipes. Bruno cooks while police procedures continue in the background — though he often answers his phone. Here’s a passage where he cooks with friends, preparing for a communal meal associated with the tennis match that is going on in parallel with the search for dangerous terrorists during much of the novel:

“Sorry, some police business,” Bruno replied, taking the box from her and heading for the club kitchen. He took his own vegetables from the fridge and began to wash and chop everything. Jack came in and unloaded various cheeses from a large bag while Miranda put a dozen pains, the double-sized, fat baguettes, onto the kitchen counter. 

The three of them began preparing bowls of salad while Bruno started to load the food mixer with chopped peppers and cucumbers to make his summer soup. He added a small wineglass of olive oil, another of white wine and some crushed garlic. Pamela began blanching the tomatoes for peeling before adding them to the soup. The mixer could make ten bowls of soup at a time. 

Once each batch was made, Bruno poured it into a jug and put it in the fridge to chill. Bruno had brought six jars of his venison pâté and in the club’s refrigerator were six chickens for roasting. Fauquet had promised six apple pies. Once the salads were done and all the potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, Miranda and her father strolled out to watch the tennis, leaving Bruno and Pamela to prepare the chickens. Bruno stuffed three with a mix of onions, sage and garlic, and Pamela stuffed her three with lemons and sprigs of thyme. They loaded them into giant roasting trays and put them all with the potatoes into the oven.

Bruno helped Pamela to wash up. “That call you said was police business,” she said. “You looked really shaken.” (p. 95)

I've written many posts about previous books in this series. Bruno’s St. Denis is indeed an idyllic town, except for an unusually high rate of criminal inhabitants and visitors, international intrigue, and a need for intervention from higher police departments in Paris and in all of Europe. These professional evildoers are thwarted, year after year, by Bruno. I'm really in awe at how Walker can come up with something new and fascinating over and over again!

The wine Bruno drinks: here’s author Martin Walker at Chateau de Tiregand from Bruno’s blog.

Review © 2022 mae sander. 

A Mural and A Graffiti

 

Painting over a graffiti: the owner of this garage, which is
very close to a new building with a very neat mural on the side.

Ann Arbor now has a wide variety of new murals.
Artist: Mike Ross.
Sponsor: Ann Arbor Art Association.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander

Regrets about The Ink Black Heart by J.K.Rowling

 

The newest Cormoran Strike detective novel by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J.K.Rowling) is The Ink Black Heart. I didn't like it at all. I forced myself to read all 1278 tedious pages, including endless quotations of complicated online interchanges between fictitious avatars in an online game and on Twitter. These were reproduced in minuscule typefaces that had to be enlarged in painful ways on my Kindle reader. Obviously, I don't know if the hardcopy version of the book was easier to read. 

I'm really not inclined to write much about this book. It's the sixth in a series of which I liked the first four, with reservations about one that was too violent. What I wrote about the fifth book, in a review titled A Very Long Book, wasn't very positive: I mentioned my sense that Troubled Blood, book number five, was much too long and involved. 

I liked The Ink Black Heart even less, and the plot and characters -- while sometimes pretty well-portrayed -- are really getting less interesting than in the earlier books. The long relationship of the two main characters, Cormoran Strike and his detective agency partner Robin Ellacot continues throughout this book. After five years they are still pretty much in the same place they started, and at this point I am losing patience and losing interest.

I suspect that many of the situations, character flaws, bad motives, pettiness, internet trolling, male chauvinism and violence, name-calling, nastiness, and other similar parts of the novel are payback for the internet abuse that J.K.Rowling has recently endured. I do feel sorry for her for being castigated in such nasty ways, but I didn't really want to share all this agony. 

I haven't read any reviews of this novel, so I don't know if anyone else shares my chagrin at missing the humor, skillful observation of human relations, great characterizations, and overall delightfulness of J.K.Rowling at her best.

Review © 2022 mae sander

September is Hunger Action Month

Ann Arbor Food Gatherers' actions to fight hunger in our community 

Most American cities have food banks that help with feeding those in need. Feeding America "is the largest charity working to end hunger in the United States. We partner with food banks, food pantries, and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger. We advocate for policies that create long-term solutions to hunger."

The Ann Arbor food bank is called Food Gatherers. They started in 1983 as a way to take surplus food from various markets and safely distribute it to people in need. Now, with a large volunteer staff and professional management, they have grown to include many types of food, and especially to try to provide healthy foods like fruit and vegetables. Need is growing, and they have been effective in increasing their services. Their mission:

"We rescue local food and leverage state and national food resources for hunger relief. We lead a network of hunger relief providers and engage the public in the fight against hunger. We create and sustain innovative new food programs in response to emerging needs. We recognize that hunger will not be solved through the provision of food alone, so we advocate for policies and system changes to create an equitable food system."

The two websites, https://www.foodgatherers.org/ and  https://www.feedingamerica.org/  offer ways that you can help if you live in the US. I hope you find your local organization and find a way contribute.

It’s beginning to look like fall! Have a good September.