Dreamland – A Self Help Manual For A Frightened Nation
With foreword by Björk.
“You authors are totally out of touch with reality”, said the cab driver to Andri Snær Magnason in the first chapter of this unique and ground-breaking work. The author accepts the challenge and takes the reader on a bizarre journey through present day Iceland, with detours to Okinawa Japan, Jamaica and Egypt. Dreamland is a deeply moving book about concerns of our times, knowledgeable and written with a rare passion that touches every reader. Dreamland is fun and activist. It is philosophical, political, full of humour and of amusing angles. It is serious but optimistic. And it has that “something” that singles out those books that find the pulse of their era, be it in Indonesia, Iceland or England.
The book can be ordered here on amazon.co.uk:
and here for international orders at Grapewire:
Soon to become a feature length documentary. A trailer with footage from the film was made for the Nattura concert and can be seen here, but the official trailer for the film is here:
,,Andri Snaer Magnason, whose scathingly funny critique of his country’s politics and society, Dreamland: A Self-Help Guide for a Frightened Nation, was a huge bestseller in this bookish country, told me this week: “In economics, they talk about the invisible hand that regulates the market. In Iceland, the free market became so wild that it was not fixed by an invisible hand, but an invisible guillotine. So, in one weekend, the whole class of our newly rich masters of the universe lost their heads (reputation, power, and money), and all the power and debt of the newly privatized companies fell into the hands of the people again.”
“Dreamland,” a devastating polemic that puts Iceland’s environmental issues into a global perspective. The book has sold 18,000 copies — the equivalent, in percentage terms, of 18 million copies in the United States.
So here they all were, one big unhappy family. The environmentalists were trying to save Iceland. The industrialists were trying to save Iceland. Everyone was trying to save Iceland.” A mental civil war,” somebody called it. A war of dreams.… Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation, a surprise, runaway best-seller exposed the spell…
Andri Snær’s Dreamland provokes thought by telling us things we did not know and have therefore not had the opportunity to deliberate or discuss openly.
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, former president of Iceland
