Review: Joy Williams on Jón Kalman Stefánsson

A perfect little novel

I thought Heaven and Hell by the Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson was a perfect little novel. Two hundred and eleven pages crowded to overflowing with words, but their passage is light, enthralling, seductive. The world is nineteenth-century Iceland, when fisherman went to sea in sixereens, slim, thin, six-oared boats that men would row up to thirty miles from shore in search of cod. Ice Age weather, then, not so long ago, with people so fatalistic about the frigid tempestuous sea that they so relied on and had no hope of controlling that they never learned to swim.

Hemingway said that weather was very important to books. Regarding this, he was correct. Weather is the principal character here—snow, wind, the unrelenting cold. Prominent too is a translated copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a borrowed book treasured by the seaman Bárður whose devotion to memorizing its near holy verse leads to his death. Bárður is fascinated by the words of books, which can be so powerful, so strong that they can “break into the kingdom of death,” though of course they can be nothing too, “torn garments that the frost penetrates, a run-down battlement that death and misfortune step lightly over.”

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This is the verse he wants to recite to his young friend, the orphaned “boy,” as they row for hours in the sixereen which is little more than a thin plank between their feet and the icy sea:
And a cowl the color
of dusk casts
over all,
accompanied by silence
and already are
beasts in burrows
and birds in nests
for the night
reposed.

“Words seemed still able to move people,” Bárður marvels, “it is unbelievable and perhaps the light is thus not completely extinguished within them, perhaps some hope yet remains, despite everything.” Yet so enchanted is he by the magic of the book he leaves on shore he neglects to bring his “waterproof” to sea. Drenched by a sudden storm he freezes to death despite the frantic efforts of his friend, the boy. This is a great scene, a formidable scene, one third of our journey through Heaven and Hell. All that can happen next is that the grieving boy, new to the depth of words that somehow seem to provide a perception into life, and twice now orphaned from family and friendship, will seek death himself—there are many ways to find it, some quite effortless—but not before he returns Paradise Lost to its owner, Kolbeinn, a former sea captain, now blind, old and quite disagreeable, in the Village, “our origin and end, the centre of the world,” days away from the fishing camp where Bárður now lies to spend eternity.

The names of the people we encounter—Bárður, Kolbeinn, Pétur, Geirþrúður, Bryndís, Brynjólfur, Ragnheiður—rise from the page like gods and goddesses from the earth’s crust—there is no softness to them, only endurance, resolve. The names of things too—waterproof, coffee, raven, oar—they cleave the difference between life and death.

A strange book, fearsome but calming with its questions Is it a loss of Paradise to die? and pronouncements Hell is to be dead and to realize that you did not care for life while you had the chance to do so, a strange book, made stranger still by the voice that appears now and then, an agent of the author Jón Kallman Stefánsson, most logically, but also the troubled soul and homesick guide of the book itself, employing words as “rescue teams” to revive extinguished lives and limn them with a solemn grandeur.

Heaven and Hell embraces and defies the categories of story—adventure, historical, romance, ghost, metaphysical. The boy survives an arduous trek clutching the book so powerful it could kill, reaches the Village and is taken up by the lives of others, distracted by them, it could be said, from his grief. At the end he sees the ghost of Bárður:
Bárður moves his lips, blue with frost and death: how long am I to wait for you, then, his voice asks inside the boy’s head. How long is your mother to wait, how long is your father to wait, and your sister who is only three years old? Why should you live and not us? … Bárður moves his cold-blue lips and says, I’m lonely here. I am too, the boy mutters, half apologetically, then he raises his voice and says, don’t go, without knowing whether he means it.

And then it begins to snow, obliterating the distance between heaven and hell, enfolding the two as one. It is Joycean snow, divine and humble, a pact between opposites, unceasingly fulfilled, and then:
He watches Bárður dissipate slowly and turn into chilling air.

I couldn’t have been happier with the conclusion of this startling little book. But no sooner had I finished than I was informed that it was the first of a trilogy. Written in 2007 it was followed in 2009 by The Sorrow of Angels and in 2011 by The Heart of Man. I was not initially thrilled by this awareness. The tedious shades of Rabbit Angstrom and Joseph and his brothers lurched through my mind, though these were tetralogies, even worse. I felt I had never been drawn to the concept of linked novels. But then I thought of J. M. Coetzee’s magnificent Jesus trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy and Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice trilogy and my mind cleared to the extravagance of possibilities and I prepared to move further into Jón Kallman Stefánsson’s cold and alluring world.

The third volume of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s “Trilogy About the Boy,” The Heart of Man, will appear in English translation in June and is available for preorder.

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Joy Williams is the author of five novels, a book of essays, and four books of stories, most recently The Pelican Child. She reviewed J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy for Book Post in 2020, Vladimir Sorokin’s Terulia for Book Post in 2022, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris for Harper’s (😐) in 2023.

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