About the book:
Gudmundur Andresson is incarcerated in the Blue Tower. With fine wit and rich bawdy he reflects on the calamity his talents, appetites and taste for satirical verse have brought upon him. As a poor but transparently clever boy, Gudmundur is sponsored by a kindly scholar but his desires for high office and a socially advantageous marriage are frustrated by the jealousy and rank-closing of powerful Icelandic families. The birth of a child out of wedlock, counter to the Great Edict – the oppressive morality law imposed by Denmark, the occupying power – and the circulation of a scurrilous thesis seal his fate. Yet ultimately his subversive history is outweighed by his loyalty to his few friends and his intellectual integrity.
(from the publisher)
Excerpt from The Blue Tower:
I am here for the most part alone with my thoughts, because my guards say little to me that I can understand, apart from what concerns my most basic needs. And the same goes for those of my fellow prisoners that I have met; I understand little of what they mean although some of them are garrulous. I had most luck in managing to puzzle out the words of a drunken clergyman who was allowed to go around loose in here for part of the day and wanted to speak Latin when it began to dawn on him that I was a man of learning. But this did not produce particularly constructive discussions, both because that man of God spoke gutturally in the Danish manner when he spoke Latin too, which greatly impaired my understanding of him, and also because he soon fell asleep where he was sitting outside my door and was not long afterwards led away, never to be seen again. He was said to be an adulterer. People come and go here, it seems, apart from me, who only came. I make an exception, too, for the murderer Fredrik, who roams around the tower at his will.
(3)
