“The Pirate,” the second installment of Jon Gnarr‘s childhood memoir trilogy, is essentially an Icelandic-punk version of “Catcher in the Rye.” Rather than Holden Caulfield wandering the streets of New York looking for someone who is not a phony, Gnarr narrates in pseudo-stream-of-consciousness style through his never-ending search for real punks in Iceland.

Gnarr was diagnosed at a young age with an intellectual disability caused by emotional and learning differences including dyslexia and ADHD, but went on to become an actor, comedian and mayor of Reykjavik in 2010. Both “The Indian,” the first installment in Gnarr’s trilogy, and “The Pirate” are somewhat emotionally challenging texts translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith and published in English by Dallas‘ Deep Vellum.

When Gnarr leaves readers in “The Indian,” he had set sail, and failed, to travel across the bay in search of a place to be alone in the world. He is a wild child, an Indian.

By contrast, in “The Pirate,” he seems to be craving normalcy as he enters his teen years. The text is first-person narrative rather than broken into short, almost poetic chunks interspersed with excerpts from psychological evaluations.

How one defines punk is a point of contention with Gnarr. Sid Vicious is punk until he isn’t anymore. Religion is squarely not punk unless attending confirmation means getting money to spend on cigarettes and punk records.

(Tribune Content Agency)