This slow, implausible but not wholly uninteresting book strikes the classic tone of middlebrow litfic – a sort of vague, wistful melancholy which allows its characters to give a lot of moody ruminations about regret and suchlike without bothering to do anything concrete which might advance the plot. If you like that kind of thing, pull up a chair.

In this case, our protagonist, Karl Ástuson, is a wealthy businessman returning from New York to his native Iceland in order to chase down the love of his life, whom he hasn't seen since they broke up as teenagers. His rather passive attempts to make progress with the one that got away are intercut with memories of a one-night stand he had with a psychologist years previously in the US.

In normal circumstances, the resolution of Karl's quest with his lost love would be withheld to the end of the book. To her credit, though, Steinunn sorts it all out by page ninety, at which point the novel shifts gear and becomes a more psychological examination of the insecurities and biases that underlie romantic or sexual behaviour. Karl, who is said to be amazing in bed but who has never had a longterm partner, seems to embody the theory of his American psychiatrist one-night stand, who believes that

the world is full of wimps and psycho mamas' boys trying to cover up their condition by playing football and setting the world afire and laying as many women as they possibly can, eternally dissatisfied because no woman is as good as mommy dearest.

Karl was very close to his mother and did not know his father: yes, it's that kind of book, and yes, Freud is invoked repeatedly.

No one in The Good Lover really behaves the way people do in life – in the end, character is sacrificed for the sake of creating psychoanalytical types. I did not think this worked in its favour, but perhaps if you're interested in portrayals of the psychology of men and women you may feel otherwise.

Philip Roughton's translation into American English reads very fluently, although the effect is slightly spoiled by a lot of typos – ‘her trousers where greenish-gray’ and ‘her movements where elegant’, both on the same page, and (more unforgivably) the original Icelandic title is misspelled on the copyright page. With any luck the market for translated fiction will explode and World Editions will be able to hire a couple more copy-editors. ( )

Sinds zijn grote liefde het 17 jaar geleden heeft uitgemaakt, heeft Karl veel "geliefden" gehad, maar hij zorgde er altijd zorgvuldig voor dat hij de nodige afstand behield. Alles moest perfect zijn, ook aan zijn geliefden. De ene keer dat het niet ging zoals hij verwachtte, was met een psychiater uit New York. Haar belt hij op als hij zelf het allemaal niet meer ziet zitten en, geheel tegen zijn gewoonten in, impulsief in de richting van zijn grote liefde is gereisd. De psychiater, niet helemaal nuchter meer, raadt hem aan de grote liefde te schaken. Dat gebeurt, en Karl en Una zijn erg gelukkig met elkaar. Nu blijkt de psychiater een boek te hebben geschreven over haar ontmoeting met Karl. Toch blijft Karl de psychiater beschouwen als zijn redder in nood.
Ook dit is weer zo'n prachtig boek van Steinunn over DE GROTE LIEFDE.