Originally published 2011 | ||
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Bankastræti núll ('0 Bank Street') is a collection of twenty-five essays about the 2008–11 Icelandic financial crisis by Einar Már Guðmundsson. It takes its name from the euphemistic name of old public toilets at the end of Bankastræti in Reykjavík, which Einar Már presents as a metaphor for the banking sector generally.
In the assessment of Alda Kravic,
although digressive and playful, ‘Bankastræti Núll’ remains an earnest effort to retrieve lost connections between past and present, politics and poetry, prosperity and poverty. Iceland’s economic collapse was not an isolated event but part of a global system that now binds Iceland and Haiti closer together as captives of the IMF. Moreover, the persistent division between the sciences and the arts and an ever-increasing specialisation of labour only heightens our sense of fragmentation and alienation.