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Fiction
“Your absence is darkness”, a novel written by Icelandic Jon Kalman Stefansson, is a complex story generated through a man’s search.
By Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is the author, most recently, of the novel “North Woods. “
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YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS, via Jon Kalman Stefansson. Translated by Philip Roughton.
Jon Kalman Stefansson’s 2007 novel “Heaven and Hell,” the first of an extraordinary trilogy, begins with a sea voyage worthy of Melville. A crew of cod fishermen is caught in a storm off a remote coast of Iceland. The land vanishes, snow swirls over the water. As the waves bear down on the soaked rowers, they must stop continually to punch off the ice that forms on their clothes. It’s a fitting image of both the sea’s terrifying indifference and a desperate, seemingly futile violence from within.
Elemental nature and human tragedy are also reflected in Stefansson’s most recent book, “Your Absence is Darkness. ” Set in farms and villages on the wind- and sea-swept Snaefellsnes peninsula of western Iceland, the novel presents communities formed in the same way through its harsh, beautiful landscape and through the history of their ancestors. .
However, the novel begins on a blank canvas. The narrator wakes up with amnesia in a church, not knowing his calling or how it was given there. You’re not alone; There’s a stranger on a bench in the back who makes him uncomfortable, and he runs off, where he meets a woman among the gravestones in the cemetery.
The woman knows him clearly; She is extremely happy with his presence and decides to take him to her sister, with whom she hints that the narrator was once close. But first, she takes him to his mother’s grave, where he tells her the story of his parents’ love. just a premonition of the narrative to come. When, despite everything, they manage to catch the woman’s sister, the narrator recounts the first of many convulsive memories that he writes down on any piece of paper he finds.
Most of “Your Absence is Darkness” is made up of those writings, which come to the narrator in the form of fugues, “as if I had received a harsh electrical shock that unleashed a wave of confused mind and unfathomable emotions within me. ” They are motivated by the mysterious stranger at the church, a shapeshifter who reappears as a bus driver, adjusts his clothes faster than a quick-change artist, and, among other quirks, offers advice on making pancakes.
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