If ever two men seemed to have nothing in common, it would be Iceland’s best-selling novelist, who’s so hung up on tradition that he writes his books in longhand, and the president of Sony Electronic Publishing, whose computer software, video games and other audiovisual products threaten to make printed books extinct.
But in this case, the novelist and the corporate prodigy have everything in common, including a name, address, shoe size and Social Security number. “They” are not two men but one man: Olafur Johann Olafsson.
During the 10 years he has worked for Sony, beginning in research and development immediately after graduating from Brandeis University with a degree in atomic physics, Olafsson has written two novels and a book of short stories. Three years ago, his latest novel, “Absolution,” became the biggest seller in Iceland’s history.
By U.S. standards, that wasn’t an epochal feat, Olafsson modestly acknowledged during an interview in his Midtown office. Whereas blockbusters routinely sell in the hundreds of thousands here, sales of “Absolution” peaked at 16,000 copies in his homeland (where its title was “Fyrigefning Syndanna”). “But,” he noted, “there are only 250,000 people in Iceland.”
While his literary reputation is evidently secure in Iceland, the 31-year-old Olafsson is known in the U.S. mostly for his precocious accomplishments at Sony, as the executive responsible for the development and marketing of “The Lawnmower Man,” “Sewer Shark,” “Creepy Crawlies” and other multimedia merchandise.
With a translation of “Absolution” just arriving in U.S. bookstores, however, Olafsson may yet find recognition here as a writer, even though it’s highly unlikely that his first novel in English will break any sales records, as it did in Iceland.
Rather than a high-voltage techno-novel, loaded with sophisticated hardware and turbocharged melodramatics in the Tom Clancy mode, or a William Gibson-style cyberspace trip, Olafsson’s “Absolution” (Pantheon) is a solemn, intellectually challenging work about the elusive nature of guilt and self-deceit, which partly takes place during World War II.
According to Olafsson, an editor at his American publishing house told him, “This is a novel that I would never have imagined a businessman writing.” Added the author: “I think that was intended as a compliment. If somebody had told me a traditional businessman was writing fiction, I would be somewhat skeptical too. Usually businessmen write time-management books or success stories, which are all horrible.”
Olafsson’s daily responsibilities at Sony require that he speak English, which he does flawlessly, with only the hint of an accent. In his nightly metamorphosis from corporate technocrat to novelist, however, he writes fiction in Icelandic, a process he described as “schizophrenic.”
Other than by his fiction, Olafsson’s split persona may be best represented by his merchandising efforts on behalf of Sony’s Data Discman, a CD-ROM “book” with a 3 1/4-inch screen. The Discman operates on audiovisual software supplied by Olafsson’s publishing division, from “The CIA World Fact Book” to a “Library of the Future,” with 150 classics on each disc, including the texts of the Bible, “Don Quixote” and “War and Peace.”
According to many cyberfreaks (and cyberphobes), the Data Discman may well be the prototype for the book of the future, an electronic gadget that, via one evolutionary clone or another, could conceivably spell the death of books in print.
No computer zealot
Even though he’s the point man for Sony software, Olafsson is not among the fanatic apostles of the new machines. Nor does he find personal escape into the fantasyland of electronics. “I sometimes play video games in product meetings or with my nephews. But I’m a lousy player. Everybody beats me.
“And I would never read fiction off a computer screen,” he insisted. “Paper is the perfect medium for that.”
On his frequent business flights, Olafsson said he carries a notebook computer, on which he could read the Modern Library classics and other books. “I use it to send memos, I fax from it, I do research. But when I read on a plane, I put the computer aside and pull out a paperback.”
As for the Data Discman, it does have its many practical uses, Olfasson said, chiefly as a portable “navigational tool through the world of information.”
“If you’re researching a scholarly work, then it’s fine to have the book electronically, because it allows you to move through it quicker, especially a book with lots of pages to leaf through. That makes sense.
“But for pleasure reading,” he said, “absolutely not. I don’t see paper disappearing. I don’t want it to disappear.”
He may not be entirely comfortable with certain aspects of the technology himself, Olafsson indicated, but he’s not torn by any moral dilemmas and, as a businessman, his attitude is strictly laissez faire.
“At Sony,” Olafsson said, explaining his apparent heresy, “we’ve always tried not to force technology into a market that doesn’t exist. . . . It’s very easy to get carried away with technology, which is oftentimes capable of doing things that people don’t want it to.
“If other people want to read `War and Peace’ on a Data Discman, that’s fine,” he said. “It’s a question of philosophy. I’d be happy to see people read linearly off a computer screen. I just don’t think they’re going to do it-not in the near future.”
For all his disclaimers and reservations, Olafsson conceded that generations of the “near future” will be very comfortable with the technology, because they’ve been raised on it. “To them, it’s just there and they use it and they don’t get intimidated by it. There’s no debate about whether it’s good or bad.”
A throwback
As he shuttles between the literary and electronic universes, Olafsson might be the ultimate interactive man. Sitting behind his desk in his Sony aerie, which is relatively small and austere, aside from its window onto Central Park, he looks lean and fit and rugged enough to model for a cartoon android in one of the company’s computer or video games, such as “CyberRace” or “Cliffhanger.”
But his earnest manner and fair-haired boyishness seem more in sync with a framed wall poster for a vintage Gary Cooper movie, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” There’s no special significance to the artwork, Olafsson said. It was among a batch of memorabilia that the previous management left behind when Sony acquired Columbia Pictures, “and I liked the movie.”
From his fast-track record at Sony, however, there’s little doubt that Olafsson has become the company’s Mr. Deeds, ever since he was recruited just out of Brandeis University by Michael Schulhof, Sony’s chief of American operations.
By all accounts, Olafsson was already an academic phenomenon before he arrived on the Brandeis campus. He was awarded a full scholarship on the basis of yet another record he holds in Iceland: for having received the highest “gymnasium” (high school and early college) grades in the country’s history.
Olafsson grew up in a bookish household in Reykjavik, which didn’t have a television set until he was 8. His father, Olafur Sigurdsson, was an eminent novelist and poet, the author of more than 20 books. By the time he entered Brandeis, Olafsson had published poetry and short stories himself, but he opted for a career in atomic physics rather than literature.
“I’d read most of the stuff in the curriculum,” said Olafsson, whose early literary influences included Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland, Graham Greene, Hemingway and Saul Bellow. “And the stuff I hadn’t read, I wasn’t all that interested in reading.
“I was always curious about physics, but I didn’t feel I knew enough about it. So I decided to study physics just to see what science was all about.”
Olafsson proved to be “absolutely brilliant,” according to one of his professors, the late Stephan Berko, in a 1981 Business Week story. Berko was dismayed to learn that his most promising student didn’t intend to pursue a career in physics. “I told him I’d just been doing this for fun,” Olafsson recalled, “and did not want to dedicate my life to it.”
Hoping to persuade Olafsson otherwise, Berko put him in touch with another of his former proteges, Michael Schulhof of Sony, who has a doctorate in physics. Schulhof turned out to be a better proselytizer for Sony than for science.
“When he saw he was not going to be able to convince me that I was making a mistake,” Olafsson said, “he offered me a job.”
A `visionary’
Olafsson started with Sony as a developer of computer components in San Jose, Calif., then was put in charge of the electronic publishing division when it was launched three years ago, a promotion that thrust him into the executive stratosphere with Peter Guber, who runs Columbia Pictures for Schulhof.
Calling Olafsson a “real visionary,” Tom Kalinske, the president of Sega, whose video games use Sony software, said, “He’s one of the few guys who understand not only video games but how interactive stories need to be told, so they’re interesting to the consumer.”
Overseeing 500 employees in an operation with annual sales of $150 million, Olafsson has little opportunity to use his background in either physics or literature. The job, he said, is “constant movement, constant decisions. It’s building new business rather than running an established one.
“I’m making sure that things go foward and that all the wheels turn at the same speed. It’s a very hectic schedule, which I’m compulsive enough to enjoy.”
His workday at Sony is not the half of it. Married and the father of a 1-year-old son, Olafsson just as compulsively works at home on the Upper East Side, nights and weekends, on his novels, stories and, lately, a play. “To sit down and write is different enough from what I do here during the day. I haven’t exhausted the part of the brain I need to use for writing.”
The physicist as writer
Olafsson’s “Absolution” is no more a physicist’s novel than it is a businessman’s. The book’s concerns are moral and spiritual, rather than scientific, centering on the diaries of Peter Peterson, an exiled, misanthropic Icelander, living in Manhattan, who has more regard for rare wines than he does for his children and grandchildren.
In some respects, the wealthy but morally bankrupt Peterson resembles an obsessive, alienated figure out of a book by Albert Camus or Jerzy Kosinski, as he broods over a “little crime” he believes he committed while living in Nazi-occupied Denmark.
The decisive acts in “Absolution” take place during World War II, two decades before the author was born. Olafsson said he chose the period, immediately after the intellectual achievements of Picasso, Joyce and Einstein, because it demonstrated that “there’s still an element in the human race that is very barbaric. . . . And if we look at the way the world is structured today, everything is a consequence of World War II.”
Even more than his fiction, perhaps, Olafsson’s work at Sony may have consequences that will last not simply for decades but for centuries. Whatever he accomplishes in shaping the future of software and electronics, Olafsson is convinced that he won’t be hastening the death of literature.
“If people want to talk about a threat to literacy, they should focus on something else,” he suggested. “Lousy books can kill literature more than anything else.”
Based on the critical reaction to his fiction, both in Iceland and in the United States, Olafsson can’t be accused of contaminating the world with inferior books.
In the opinion of Njordur Njardvik, professor of Icelandic literature at the University of Iceland, Olafsson is “a good writer, perhaps a better short-story writer than a novelist. He’s not yet on the level of his father, who was one of the greatest novelists of our century. But he’s only written three books and one day he certainly might be.”
The first U.S. review of “Absolution,” which appeared in Kirkus Reviews, called Olafsson’s first novel in English “beautifully crafted” and said he was a “welcome new voice.”
With two books still to be translated into English and another novel in progress, Olafsson said his literary voice will continue to be heard, no matter how pressing his duties at Sony.
“I do it because it gives me fulfillment,” he said, adding a rare lapse into businesspeak: “That’s the bottom line.”
