I recently had the opportunity to speak to Mr.Hordur Arnason, CEO at Landsvirkjun, the company responsible for 70% of Iceland's electricity supply. I will put geothermal power as a subject for another article, so I shall concentrate on hydroelectric power. The country's electricity comes almost entirely from hydroelectric and geothermal sources. The figures show that hydropower accounts for 70% of Iceland's electricity supply, and the importance of this is clear.Īnd for that matter, there is not a single thermal or nuclear power station in Iceland. It may sound a bit far-fetched to bring this up here, but it seems to me that it is an illustration of the importance of water resource management to Iceland's energy planning. She is a researcher, and a water specialist at the Ministry for Energy Affairs. In fact, she reappears at the end of the story and her name is revealed to be 'Sunna'. The woman who finds the body has nothing to do with the rest of the story, but for some reason I find the character of this lonely woman fascinating. I especially love this introduction of the book to the extent that I have read this part several times. The story begins when a woman discovers a skeleton corpse at the bottom of the lake, which has suddenly dried up due to tectonic activity. The original title, Kleifarvatn, (“The Man in the lake, Mizuumi no otoko” Japanese title) is the name of a real lake outside of Reykjavik. Before I arrived in Iceland as Ambassador, this book was recommended to me and I was fortunate enough to have a chance to read it. The book was translated into Japanese by Ms.Yumiko Yanagisawa, a translator living in Sweden, and published in Japan in 2017 by Tokyo Sogensha. He is a master storyteller, and has a real gift for evoking the complex humanity at the heart of the most dour-seeming individuals.It is a mystery novel written in 2004 by Mr.Arnaldur Indridason, one of the Iceland’s most beloved authors. The undiplomatic German ambassador may remark that in career terms 'Iceland is the back end of the world', but this series places Indridason at the centre of the best of contemporary crime fiction.

Erlendur himself is a wonderful invention: still grieving for the little brother who vanished in a blizzard when they were children, he is obsessed with unexplained disappearances. Missing Persons files are reopened, and the trail leads back to love, loss and betrayal in 1950s Leipzig, as well as to Icelandic spy networks during the cold war. The waters of Lake Kleifarvatn mysteriously recede, revealing a 30-year-old skeleton with a hole in its skull.

O nce you get over the characters sounding as if they've escaped from Icelandic sagas - the detective Erlendur has an estranged son called Sindri Snaer, a wonderfully onomatopoeic name for any disaffected youth - Indridason's novels are an undiluted pleasure.

The draining lake arnaldur indridason