A tale was seldom so haunting as this pearl by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. The saline seawinds of the Icelandic winter enable him to shape and empathise with a most unusual narrator. That is to say, it is the Dead that recount, those swallowed up by the rhythm of the ocean. In this way, Stefánsson reaches a ruthlessly neutral tone. While orchestrating the most terrible scenes, he offers the reader no solace at all. No sweet words. The Dead are so bleak that the protagonist never receives a name, from page one he is simply known as the boy. And everything the boy endures, only the most destructive experiences, he endures them alone, from beginning to end. This is all normal. This is how life works, no two ways about it.
In stark contrast with these crushing facts, Stefánsson brings his lacerating tale in very elegant, gorgeous language. The long, impersonal poem forces even the stoic inside you to shed a tear at reading this masterpiece.
“I just don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I am.
And I’m not entirely sure I’ll be given time to find out.”
Through the voice of the boy, the author expresses our most humane doubts in wonderful ways. Incidentally, for anyone looking for an epitaph, the book is steeped in them.
“A dead man is so much heavier than one who lives,
the sparkling memories have become dark, heavy metal.”
Stefánsson seizes the otherworldly panorama of Iceland, trapped between a cruel sea and all-seeing mountains, embraced by snowstorms and misty mornings, and paints it down as only a master can capture such scenes. The island offers no home to its inhabitants, and against all odds, the Viking sons and daughters continue to fight for their place in the sun, even though it barely shines there.
“There is nothing to see in Iceland except mountains, waterfalls, tussocks and this light that can pass through you and turn you into a poet”.
Who is Jón Kalman Stefánsson?
Born in Reykjavik (1963), he grew up in Keflavik, where he held various jobs for a few years after his secondary education. Later, he studied literature but did not complete his degree; instead, he wrote his first articles for the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið. From these early writings grew a remarkable authorship. He won the Man Booker International Prize for his work Fish Have No Feet, and he has already been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize four times. I suppose he will also end up with a Nobel Prize for Literature to his name one day.
