Stage adaptation rights available
“A spectre is haunting the streets of the world, the spectre of the Beatles. “
This is the opening line to Einar Mar Gudmundsson´s novel, which shows how embedded the Beatles were to become in the minds of Icelandic school children in the seventies – and shake their lives.
Master storyteller Einar Mar Gudmundsson returns with this wonderful book, which in its narrative approach and style is a kind of The Knights of the Spiral Staircase meets Angels of the Universe.
Nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize 2004.
Sold to Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.
Reviews:
The Beatle Manifesto bursts with Rock’n’roll and is a candid manifesto of the influence the Beatles had on the soul of the nation.
Skafti Th. Halldórssson, TMM
Great fun, absolutely hilarious in places.
Melkorka Óskarsdóttir, Fréttablaðið
The author is in top form… The Beatle Manifesto is an entertaining book, written with roguish boyish verve.
Páll Baldvin Baldvinsson, DV
I laughed so much my wife thought I was going a bit funny in the head.
Gunnar Thórdarson musician
– You pay tribute to the Beatles and rock music in this book and praise it as a deep influence.
“This is the music I grew up with and it continues to influence me greatly. So it’s hardly surprising that I was tempted to weave a story out of it, and in a way it’s a kind of homage to rock music. The way I see it, this is a kind of ode to the joy of life. But there’s always an element of blues that fuels life as well and that’s also represented in the story.
My take on life isn’t all that different in this book than it is in the others that I’ve written. Generally speaking, my characters are always trying to find a way to connect to life – and normally manage to do so in various peculiar ways.”
“When I grew up there were much larger generation gaps between, say, the type of music parents listened to and kids listened to. Nowadays they often listen to the same music. The Beatles’s music hit our homes by storm. And the story taps into the power it had to spread around the globe. I think it promoted positive values in the word, by, for example, placing the emphasis on love. The Beatles culture was a kind of counterbalance to the rough macho culture so prevalent at the time.
There is an element of nostalgia in all stories but that is just one aspect of this story; my real interest was to recreate the energy of this period. It’s a kind of declaration. And that’s how I always read literature; when you read about different periods, they’ll often say something about your own times.
Morgunbladid, interview with the author by Einar Falur Ingólfsson
The title is a good example of the ambiguity of Einar Már’s references, these few words fuse the Beatles and the Communist Manifesto into one, and it’s very clear from the opening lines of the book that that is the manifesto he is referring to and none other. But this reference is then amusingly woven into the plot through Jóhann who works as a newspaper delivery boy, delivering the Icelandic Labour Party’s newspaper Alþýðublaðið and an usual deal he’s got going with the doorman of the local cinema: the doorman lets him into the cinema for free in return for a free copy of the paper.
…If we are to view this from a Marxist perspective, the newspaper delivery boy and the doorman are undermining the capitalist economic system through this barter of theirs, which, needless to say, works to their mutual advantage. The hidden irony being, of course, that they were also undermining the Alþýðublað, not to mention the fact that this was precisely the method individuals used in the late Soviet Union to subvert their economic system.
… Full of spring and mischief… A fun read.
Icelandic State Radio, Vídsjá. Gauti Kristmannsson
