Lover.That was the word he used for the women in his life. Never “sex partner,” never “one-night stand,” but lover, even if it had nothing to do with love.
The Good Lover tells the story of Karl Ástuson, a charming businessman. He was raised by an excessively indulgent and overprotective mother, who died when he was only eighteen years old. This loss has profoundly impacted Karl’s life and his dealings with women.
Karl’s love life consists of a string of meaningless affairs. The only woman who came close to his ‘perfect’ mother, was his first and only love Una. At twenty years old, after dating for a couple of months, Una left him without as much as an explanation. Years later, despite the wealth and female attention he now enjoys, Una has left a void within Karl that he seems unable to fill.
Impulsively and uncharacteristically, he travels back to Reykjavik, and finally wins her over. Before they have the chance to live out their happy ending, Karl’s womanizing past catches up with him when an ex immortalizes him in a novel as ‘the good lover’.
Steinunn Sigurðardóttir has written an intriguing, unusual and beautiful novel about the messiness of love that will stay with the reader for a long time.
R E V I E W S
“This is an excellent story by Sigurðardóttir on love and its complications, on the past catching up with you and on what we really want and how we do not always get it. Throw in the mummy’s boy/Oedipus theme, the idea that all too many people think everyone else is an idiot, particularly their parents and the theory that women are better lovers than men and you have an original and fascinating novel.”
themodernnovel.org
“Is the good lover also a good man? Steinunn Sigurðardóttir offers no easy answers in a tale of united lovers and lost loves. …
As readers we watch with great satisfaction as the past of the eponymous ‘good lover’ catches up with his present. Karl’s tangled family history and twisted relationship with women soon threaten the stability of his newfound happiness with his childhood sweetheart, Una. … The award-winning translator Philip Roughton renders Sigurðardóttir’s narrative in a bare and unadorned English prose that reflects the stark story-telling of the Icelandic language and tradition. Without a superfluous word, the translation evokes the frost-encrusted island in the middle of a stormy sea with as much clarity as the sharply delineated New York skyline. …
Sigurðardóttir delivers an intelligent narrative that challenges the borders between reality, fiction, and academic inquiry.“
Alice Olsson, Europen, eurolitnetwork.com
