Your Absence Is Darkness

Starred review from January 29, 2024
Stefánsson (Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night) delivers an astonishing, free-wheeling narrative of an amnesiac’s search for meaning. It begins with the unnamed narrator’s arrival at a church somewhere in the Westfjords of Iceland, where the sorrow he feels over his inability to remember is exacerbated by the advice he receives from a man he mistakes for a priest: “Keep in mind that sometimes life is the questions, death the answer.” Outside the church, the narrator encounters a woman with a sheep in tow, which she believes is her dog. The narrator’s spirits lift when the woman seems to recognize him. Their encounter sets the stage for a serpentine and splintered set of stories covering several generations, beginning with the woman’s wondrous account of her late mother, who breaks off her wedding engagement with a fellow Reykvíkingur after the two have car trouble and she falls for the young farmer who comes to their aid. What makes this so irresistible is the narrator’s constant optimism as he probes profound questions from within the murk of his consciousness (“Give me darkness, and then I’ll know where the light is”). Stefánsson is poised to make his mark on the world stage.

December 15, 2023
A multigenerational saga about hard living in rural Iceland. This hefty novel from the veteran Icelandic novelist opens with a case of lost memory: An amnesiac man wakes up in a churchyard and makes his way to the farmlands in the country's more sparsely populated northern reaches. There he gathers stories about the residents' often dour lives: infidelities, fatal car wrecks, early promise hitting the skids. Stef�nsson's novel encompasses a host of characters, but two of their stories occupy the bulk of it. In one, Gu�r��ur, a 19th-century farmer's wife, captures the imagination of a priest and journal editor with a philosophical essay about earthworms; the intellectual and romantic flirtation that ensues threatens to upend both of their lives. Another storyline turns on her great-great-grandson, Eir�kur, who's half-successfully used his musical talent to manage a relationship with his father and find love, even if one longtime partner was married. Early on, the main drama involves Eir�kur's arrest for shooting at a truck--a thin peg to hang a long novel on. And Stef�nsson's historical meanderings, including matters of faith, sex, and religion (Kierkegaard is repeatedly mentioned), can test a reader's patience. Yet in evoking melancholy, Stef�nsson (and translator Roughton) have ably elicited the feeling that "it can be so difficult to live that it's visible from the moon." And his descriptions of the northern Icelandic landscape are elegantly written and a perfect match for the vibe. "Your eyes shine so beautifully when you talk about your fjord...that the sadness disappears from them," one of Eir�kur's lovers tells him. "Keep going, don't stop!" A series of song references, from Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen to various Scandinavian acts, supports the notion that the sadness has a kind of music to it; the novel is appended with "Death's Playlist." A relentlessly somber yet lyrical study of grief across decades.

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