Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most famous writers on the international stage, and he always has a lot of irons in the fire. He has written novels, plays, children’s books, poems, a full-length documentary, and he has even dabbled a bit in city planning. One of his cleverest works, “The Casket of Time,” has recently been translated into 12 languages, including English.
In his own words, the story concerns a magical invention, the TimeBox, that “seals you from time so you can skip a day, a week or a year, if times are bad or boring. You can skip the rainy days, the dark days, the Februaries and Mondays. You can avoid things that are difficult or annoying. You can kind of binge on the good days.”
340 pages.
Excerpt from interview Reykjavík Grapevine did 2019:
The underlying theme in “The Casket of Time,” Andri says, is that “maybe you do not get bright days if you avoid the dark days. Maybe you will not enjoy the holidays if you have skipped all the Mondays and that things do not get better if everyone just waits for things to get better. But the books are literature, a study on human nature and attempts to create modern mythology. And the themes are more philosophically presented than direct lessons to be learned.”
Other great books from Andri Snær in our book store (no more shipping cost with DHL as shipment option):