The novel Gauragangur, translated to English by David McDuff.
From Turmoil:
I would rather have read three years' worth of Woman's Own than have to see that film twice. I was almost on the point of losing my mind.
'If I could stretch my arm to be forty metres long, I would first cut the throats of allt he actors with your penknife, and then tear the screen to shreds,' I muttered.
'What are you muttering?' Linda asked.
Unfortunately I could only get one metre into the auditorium from the balcony, where we sat like mice in a trap.
What amusement could be had in the prison of the entertainment industry? I tried to slip my hand down between Linda's thighs when a cloud at last passed over the moon on the screen. But that damned leather was as thick as elephant hide, and she had her legs pressed so tightly together that you might have thought I had suggested she lay a golden egg in my hand.
There was a terrible smell of leather from her. I noticed it when i leaned against her and rubbed my nose on her left breast.
'Ormur!' she whispered. 'Watch the film, you idiot!'
'Tell the actors to go home and leave us in peace,' I whispered back.
'People have begun to stare at us.'
'That I can well understand - anything is better than that wet blanket on the screen up there with two days' groth of stubble on his chin. He doesn't even know how to load a revolver!'
'He hasn't got a revolver!'
'Precisely - because he can't load it.'
'Shhhh,' someone said behind us.
I turned round and offered the man some popcorn, but he shook his head.
'What can I offer you, then?' I asked. There was no reply.
At last they had all wept and struggled for their wages on the screen, and all that was left was an unappetizing kiss that seemed to have no end, and then a really nauseating scene in which two horribly fat children came rushing into the bedroom of their mother, who lay there smiling like a halfwit from ear to ear in the arms of the ape with the two days' growth of stubble. I nearly threw up as the canned soup of the violins dripped down the screen and covered everything. THE END, it said, and I felt as happy as a man who has been lifted up from a sunken submarine.
'A beautiful film,' Linda siad out on the pavement, wiping the last remains of teardrops from the corners of her heyes.
'Wonderfully made,' I said. 'Brilliant direction. And the mainrole acress is unbelievable. She is really in a class of her own.'
Linda stood still and put on her leather gloves.
'Ormur,' she said, and I could hear her voice tremble. 'I'm not stupid, and I don't like being spoken to as if I were an idiot!'
'No, of course not.'
'Of course not what?'
'Just of course you are not an idiot.'
She stalked off down the street. I changed into fourth gear and caught up with her outside The Working Clothes Shop on Hverfisgata.
'Linda,' I said. 'this all comes from the fact that up there on the moon, where I grew up, there is only one cinema, and it shows the same film all the time.'
'What kind of film?'
'The History of the Human Race uncensored.'
'OK, but I don't like being molested at the cinema!'
'I'll never molest you at the cinema again.'
'Didn't you ever learn any manners?'
'As I just told you, I grew up in one of the deepest craters on the moon.
(120-1)
