Kjartan’s investigation appears to be running smoothly when ghosts from his own past surface and unexpected and gruesome events upset the otherwise peaceful island life. The riddle itself is part of the story as two of its characters discuss it between themselves throughout, and only towards the end is it revealed who these two characters are. It turns out that the cryptographer had visited the island to try to solve a famous riddle, the Flatey Enigma, stored in the library along with the copy of Flateyjarbók. On Flatey Kjartan becomes acquainted with some of the island community’s quirky characters and, with the assistance of the police in Reykjavík, slowly the pieces of the puzzle start coming together.Įarly on, Kjartan establishes that the cryptographer’s death is linked to Flateyjarbók (the Flatey Book), the largest of the Icelandic ancient manuscripts, compiling sagas of the Norse kings, the sagas of the Greenlanders, among others, a copy of which is kept in the Flatey library. So begins the plot in The Flatey Enigma ( Flateyjargáta) by Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson. In 1960, the body of a Danish cryptographer is found on an uninhabited island in Breiðafjörður Bay in West Iceland and Kjartan, a lawyer working at the District Commissioner’s office in Patreksfjörður, is sent to Flatey island to solve the mystery of his death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |