A man—waking up from a nap? Teleported? — regains consciousness, sitting in the front row of a small church in a village in western Iceland. He doesn’t remember anything and doesn’t even know his name. But some people speak to him, are happy to see him again and, in turn, will start telling him things.
This is the background to the thirteenth novel by poet and novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson, born in 1963, author of a powerful work that openly flirts with lyricism. As shown by Between heaven and earth, Besides, fish don’t have feet. (Gallimard, 2010 and 2015) as well as Asta (Grasset, 2018).
Little by little a truth will be imposed: this amnesiac man who collects the confidences of each other is a writer. He drags besides, one points out to him, a manuscript covered with a writing in crow’s feet. By dint of listening, he will thus assemble a collection of love and death stories that span time.
Kaleidoscope of stories, promising or broken destinies, Your absence is only darkness takes us from one character to another. From a couple of farmers in love separated after a road accident to an ex-sex slave from Syria or this nineteenth-century pastorand century who wrote to the German poet Hölderlin and dreamed of following the “compass of the heart”. It happens to everyone to make bad choices: “No man can live without breaking his treasures at least once. »
Haunted by metaphysics, moving or confusing, Your absence is not only darknesslike most of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s books, thus overlaps destinies and eras, connects reflections and dialogues, seasoned here with words by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Beatles or Tom Waits.
To live, he tells us, is to risk, to win and to lose. Darkness is inseparable from light. “Life is probably always difficult. Even in direct sunlight, we harbor valleys of darkness within us. Is this the price to pay for being a human? »
Sometimes a bit smug, it is true, Jón Kalman Stefánsson makes the passage of time palpable, “a loaded gun, a scree that descends on your life, a yesterday that never comes”.
Deal with loneliness
Another book, another fjord, the same island of fire and ice. A man, an advertising copywriter, stays for several months in the old chalet lent to him by his girlfriend’s uncle, in a fjord in eastern Iceland. He seems to monologue to mute the “acute cacophony” of his life and composes for himself — in addition to having to deal with loneliness — strange melodies inspired by his environment.
Attentive to the rustling of insects, the song of birds or the breath of the wind, he composes works entitled Funeral march (for beginners) Where Study for cello, saw and hammer. It’s something he does as he breathes, he explains to us.
Gyrðir Elíasson, author ofAt the edge of the Sandá and of The south window (La Peuplade, 2018 and 2020), entrusts the narration to this character who inspires neither sympathy nor aversion. Requiemwhich comes to close the trilogy on the loneliness of the Icelandic writer, proceeds from the same modus operandi : to make us penetrate in the intimacy of an artist (here a “composer of drawer”). Alone facing the world, the narrator will monologue from his feelings and his reflections, camped in the Icelandic nature, a setting that is both sober and spectacular.
But after losing a “priceless” notebook and losing his wife (who left him over the phone and perhaps didn’t like him much anymore), after wasting his time, he will come to wonder if he wouldn’t be losing her mind too. An unfortunately communicative boredom.