Some of the most exciting, mind-bending, innovative literature these days comes out of the Nordic countries, in my humble and slightly pretentious opinion. I’ve yet to be disappointed by going with the selection criteria of “new book translated to English from a Nordic country,” and so my desire to read Your Absence is Darkness, by Jón Kalman Stefánsson and translated to English by Philip Roughton has its roots in this: written in Icelandic? With a mysterious plot summary? I’m on board. I’m going to read that. And Stefánsson, deftly translated by Roughton, comes through for me. However, this is not a book that yields pleasant reading rewards – it’s challenging, mysterious, and almost entirely defies the idea of having a story contained in its musings. This is not a book for everyone, and in fact, may not often be a book for me, either, due to the demands it makes of a reader. But it is worthy of the challenge, even if you’re not entirely sure of what you read even at the end of it.
In a remote village in Iceland, a man comes to consciousness, and doesn’t know who he is or how he got there. His initial stumblings lead him to Halfrún, a woman who seems to not only know who he is, but can tell him about his lineage. Through a sweeping story of several generations, we’re brought into a family epic centred in a remote part of the world involving a cast of unlikely characters: an uneducated rural farmwife writing articles about earthworms, a son whose origins are hidden from him, a musician whose soul died the day his son was born, and other not-entirely-happy-but-not-fully-unhappy characters.
Stefánsson uses this strange, remote backdrop and twisted, non-chronological story to explore the ideas of destiny and fate, and the weight of simple choices, with their consequences lasting generations beyond the original actions. It’s easy to get lost in Your Absence is Darkness; the prose is lovely if often heavily philosophical, and the shifting nature of the narrative can be challenging to follow. But somehow, these things do not matter once you let the story flow over you: the characters will flit in and out of your view, the original mystery of the narrator ceases to matter, and suddenly you’re part of these people’s lives. Stefánsson is a brilliant storyteller, and Roughton’s translation is well-done, capturing the meandering tone of the characters as they wander through the decades.
Stefánsson is a brilliant storyteller, and Roughton’s translation is well-done, capturing the meandering tone of the characters as they wander through the decades … I don’t think one reading is quite enough for this novel.
Your Absence is Darkness is a book that I enjoyed, one I found challenging and thoughtful, and one I need to sit with and reread, because I don’t think one reading is quite enough for this novel. It’s one that has the potential to mean different things at different times, and I want to give it that chance. But for a first round— it was a unique read with a complex setting, and I took a lot away from it.
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
Philip Roughton is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness. He was the winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man, and shortlisted for the same prize for About the Size of the Universe.
Publisher: Biblioasis (March 5, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 432 pages
ISBN: 9781771965811
Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.
