Review: Joy Williams on Jón Kalman Stefánsson

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.

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