Like the Country? Read the Book

By Karen Holt -- Publishers Weekly, 12/3/2007 6:53:00 AM

I’m riding in an all-hydrogen powered Prius down a street in Reykjavik, with Icelandic pop songs on the radio and a woman at the wheel who has just explained how she got her New York driver’s license revoked, when the thought occurs to me: Is this anyway to promote a book?

To back up, it started with a simple, but innovative idea: William Morrow publicist Danielle Bartlett wanted to pro

Sigurdardottir and Debbie Scott

mote the U.S. debut of popular Icelandic novelist Yrsa Sigurdardottir by doing an in-flight book signing of her murder mystery, Last Rituals. She contacted Icelandair’s media relations manager Debbie Scott. From there, the idea morphed into a four-day trip for six journalists, arranged and paid for by Iceland Air, in which the writers spent time time with Sigurdardottir visiting locations relevant to her book.

“We wanted to make Yrsa more visible to U.S. booksellers, the literary community basically,” says Bartlett, who accompanied the journalists on the trip. “She’s a great talent. We want to keep her with us, for a long time and we wanted to show her in a different light."

Last Rituals, about a female lawyer trying to solve the murder of a young man, is set in contemporary times but features demon-worship, Icelandic folklore and medieval witchcraft. It came out in the U.S. in October. Next fall Morrow will publish a second book in the series featuring the same protagonist, My Soul to Take.

The trip—dubbed the “Literary Media Express”--began on the evening of Nov. 28 with a book signing in the Icelandair terminal of Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where passengers waiting for their flight got free books, cake and champagne.  Sigurdardottir, Bartlett, Scott and two of the journalists flew to Iceland from there, while the rest of us took flights out of New York or Boston.

Once we landed, the trip in many ways resembled a typical press junket for travel journalists, in which writers are wined, dined and shuttled around to tourist spots. The “literary” part was decidedly soft-sell, with the author joining us on portions of the trip and blending in as one of the group, not someone with a book to push.

Day 1 (Nov. 29): After naps and lunch we head to the Hertz dealership, where the first three all-hydrogen powered rental cars in the world had arrived the day before. We break up into groups of two or three and take them out for a test drive.

In a neat past-future juxtaposition, we go next to see the Icelander, a 75-foot sailboat built to historically accurate Viking specifications. It’s dark and the wind is biting, so we huddle in a nearby “turf” house and ask questions of its builder and owner, Gunnar Marel Eggertsson.

Next it’s on to the Blue Lagoon spa for a geothermal soak and dinner. By 11, we are on the bus, going back to the hotel. Most of us journalists have not yet to met Sigurdardottir.

Day 2: The author joins us on a morning bus tour of the city. At one stop, I get a few minutes alone with her and we talk about the challenge of writing murder mysteries in a country that prides itself on its low crime rate. The 44-year-old mother of two, who has a full-time day job as a civil engineer, is smart and personable. She’s the kind of writer who is happy to talk about her book if you ask, but won’t bring it up if you don’t.

Back at the hotel in the afternoon, we have a guest speaker, Sigurdur Atlason from the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. Sigurdardottir got to know him while researching her book. He goes into detail about “necropants,” which are pretty much what they sound like, and figure into the plot of Last Rituals. When Bartlett asks if he knows any love potions, he whips off his shoes and his button-down shirt and dons sheepskin slippers, a tunic and a pouch made from the scrotum of a ram. He puts a love spell on Liz French, appropriately enough, the managing editor of Romantic Times BookReviews Magazine. A photographer from Icleland’s bi

Sigurdur Atlason casts a love spell on Liz French of Romantic Times

ggest newspaper, Morgunbladid, shoots the whole thing for a feature on Sigurdardottir.

Day 3: We spend the day, without the author, touring Iceland’s spectacular wilderness in a “Super Jeep” that can drive over snow and through icy ponds. From there, we visit two museums, one devoted to elves and trolls, the other to ghosts.

Sigurdardottir and her husband drive an hour to join us for dinner at a lobster place. She arrives with several skeins of wool yarn that she picked up that day for one of the journalists, who wanted to bring some home for his wife.

Day 4: We board a bus and head to the home of Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson. Sigurdardottir and her husband meet us there. We’re a few minutes early, so Sigurdardottir gets on the bus and signs books for us. She tells us the Morgunbladid story was published that day and there’s a picture of us in it. She’s only seen it online, so she doesn’t have a copy to show us. (We do find copies, later at the airport, and are thrilled to see French prominently pictured.).

A few minutes later, we are standing in a circle in the president’s receiving room, while an aide serves us champagne and macaroons. “How is a literary visit different from other visits?” he asks. We don’t have a good answer to that, so he continues, “I think this is a new phenomenon for us, people coming to visit to see the locations of modern literary works.”

Like most Icelanders, he enjoys pointing out how safe his country is. It’s true that his own house has about the same level of security found in a typical American home, maybe less. “It’s a remarkable achievement to write crime literature in a society such as this,” he says.

Sigurdardottir adds, “The big challenge is to make it interesting to read and plausible to the Icelandic reader.” The author, whose work is translated into 30 languages, says she resists the temptation to cater to foreign tastes. “I would rather sell less copies and be honest and not be ridiculous in my own country.”

Still, a short time later, she tells me that it’s very important to her to break out into the U.S. market. And she says she hopes this trip helped us understand the culture. “Iceland is a place that people have heard of, but they don’t know very much about,” she says. “We’re so proud of this country and it can seem kind of ridiculous if you haven’t been here.”

We shoot a lot of pictures of the president, hug Sigurdardottir goodbye and get back on the bus for the ride to the airport. Bartlett and Scott are already discussing doing another trip to launch the U.S. release of Sigurdardottir’s next book.