Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
Few writers have the talent of the Icelandic Jón Kalman Stefánsson to narrate rural life on the edge of the world.
Like his unforgettable diptych Besides, fish don’t have feet. and To the extent of the universe, Your absence is only darkness is a logorrheic family saga from which it is impossible to extricate oneself. One could call it a prolix rambling; and yet, we are bewitched by this melancholic song, unable to break away from it over the course of some 600 pages which relate the impossible choices of five generations.
In the summer of 2020, as tourists cautiously return to Iceland after a pandemic spring, a man who has lost his memory finds himself in a remote part of the country. As he talks with the locals, he begins to write the history of their ancestors so that the dead will never be forgotten. Thus, the narrator goes back more than a century of people who have read, lived, loved, betrayed and passed away. There’s Aldis, who left Reykjavik to be with the man she fell in love with. Or Eirikur, who traveled the world before returning to his family. “He or she who cuts himself off from his roots, who loses them and flees his past, has nowhere left to go,” writes Stefánsson.
In this fjord “away from the world”, which retains captive and appeases at the same time, life flows at a distinct rhythm, a thousand leagues from the changes that are transforming Europe at the same time. The text is peppered with sentences that we want to underline and re-read – “even in direct sunlight, we shelter valleys of darkness within us” –, magnificently translated by Éric Boury, who is considered one of the greatest carriers of Icelandic literature. He was also awarded the Grand Prize for translation by the Société des Gens de Lettres upon the publication of Besides, fish don’t have feet.
Crossed on both sides by the thought of Kierkegaard as well as music by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Beatles and Nick Cave, among many others, this novel, which won the 2022 France Inter/Foreign Book Prize Le Point probes the story of these men and women who had to make heartbreaking decisions – to leave, to accept their destiny or to give up – and explores the paradoxes of existence with a universality that goes beyond the borders of a era or territory.
Your absence is only darkness
Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Translated from Icelandic by Éric Boury
Grasset
608 pages