...or, as the philosophical investigators Wible and Pacheco also describe their activities, the case is the world, indeed.
Now, after a second reading in close succession to [from?] the first, I feel that I've come closer to 'solving' Icelander than I was immediately after the first time through (eg, I'm pretty sure that it's Hubert Jorgen who is responsible for all the footnotes, and that he was indeed in cahoots with the mysterious Surt...is/was Magnus really Surt? Yes. No. Maybe.), but that's still not particularly close. Deliberately enigmatic, confounding, unresolved, the text's stocks in trade are uncertainty, misunderstanding, simulacra and forgery, failure of meaning ("I -- no" / "I know") and paranoia; unreliable intertexts abound along with self/meta-referentiality (the throwaway Wittgenstein pastiche above, the coroner named Barthes, the victim named MacGuffin, the copy of Tristram Shandy lying around, &c, &c), and while there's a denouement of sorts (complete with the hoariest old detective fiction cliches, the gathering of the major protagonists in the parlour, ready to hear the explanation for all that has gone before), it doesn't at all function in the way that, on its surface, it might seem to.
The comparisons made by the blurb-writers to The Crying of Lot 49 and Nabokov are spot-on - as to that latter, Pale Fire in particular is much in the same vein - and, rather than seeming merely derivative, Icelander achieves a pleasing synthesis of many of the best aspects of those two and the various streams which come with them. In fact, the one thing that holds me back from believing Icelander to be genuinely touched by greatness is that it wears those influences too much on its sleeve - the centrality of the disputed play texts seems a direct nod to Lot 49 (and even if it isn't, the in-that-case-unintentional is rather too marked), while the manner in which the footnotes are used is very similar to that in the Nabokov...
But, that said, Long is very recognisably a writer of the now (although I didn't realise this until I'd got the book home and started reading it, it's on McSweeney's, and that fits) - he doesn't have the ever-ramfiying erudition of a Pynchon or the elegant classicism of a Nabokov (or, at least, he doesn't have them on display in his writing), and I get the impression that he's much more in line with the likes of JSF and Dave Eggers...but unlike, say, Everything Is Illuminated or AHWOSG, the way in which Icelander invokes and engages with its theoretical/conceptual terrain convinces me (whereas I must confess that I often found while reading both of those former two, and the Foer in particular, that I was thinking thoughts along the lines of "yeah, yeah, I've read the same secondary sources explaining the theory you're gesturing at as you - and I bet I understood it better than you, too" (gosh I can be an unattractive person sometimes!)). Then again, while both JSF and Eggers are capable of writing genuinely affecting passages and wholes, Long doesn't even try - that's not what Icelander's all about, and maybe it couldn't possibly be.
What it shares with Lot 49, Pale Fire (which, I ought interject, I've never read in full), Everything Is Illuminated and AHWOSG is the characteristic of being very, very funny, laced with a fine sense of the absurd, and a structure and sensibility which make that humour intrinsic and essential to the novel as a whole. Whether the humour is linguistic, riddle or joke-based, satirical, slapstick, some combination of the above, or something else altogether, one always feels that it's integral to the whole.
And likewise with all the other little details from which Icelander is constructed - and there are so many such details to savour, from the quirks in writing style to the eccentricities of the characters to the weird left turns in the narrative...and the whole time there's a strange sense of familiarity to it all, whether people are being abducted by the Refurserkir, fox-shirted spirit warriors who are able to summon an absence from which to appear (so that a sure sign that they are nearby is precisely when one hears and senses nothing, which is just like the sound that the Refurserkir don't make), or there is skaldic karaoke in the offing (traditional epic Icelandic heroic ballads done in beer halls), or people are musing about the semiotic significance of a dog's bark or the relationship between cause, effect, and being (ineptly) followed by the subject of one's own (circuitous) investigation.
So, Icelander is excellent - offhand, I'd say that it's my favourite book that I've read this year so far.
