“Every great and original writer,” wrote William Wordsworth, “must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.” The Icelandic writer Jon Kalman Stefansson, whose style impresses the reader as idiosyncratic at first, then irresistible, certainly meets that mandate in his 2008 novel “Heaven and Hell,” now published in North America for the first time.
The setting is a remote Icelandic fishing community at an unspecified time in the past — the characters “are little more to you than names on leaning crosses and cracked headstones” — but probably the late 19th century. (The only marker we’re offered is a newspaper report that Émile Zola has recently published a new novel.) It’s a place where men think little and say less, where actions seem to count more than words, and where chins are invisible under enormous beards. “If one of them made the mistake of shaving,” it would constitute “a part of his personality cut off, nothing but half a man remaining.”
Not everyone is a stereotype in this story about a fishing trip and its aftermath. On board the small boat — a “sixereen” — is Bardur, who reads an 1828 translation of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” despite the general view of his crewmen: “For a sea captain to value poetry as highly as fish, well, what kind of captain is that, in fact?” Also present are Bardur’s friend, known only as “the boy”; the skipper, Petur (“his words are law”); and three others.
Stefansson’s narrative voice is the book’s most striking quality. It has something in common with the “slow prose” of Jon Fosse: run-on sentences, rich in repeated motifs, that tap into different layers of thought. A typical line in Philip Roughton’s translation is flexible and supple, telescoping from close-up to wider view: “The stove heats the loft, it’s cozy here, the evening condenses against the windows, the wind strokes the rooftop, Gvendur and Einar chew tobacco, rock in their seats, sigh well and mmm hmm alternately, the paraffin lamp gives a good light and makes the evening outside darker than it is, the more light, the more darkness, that’s the way of the world.”
This swinging style is seductive, and forgiving to maxims that might seem hokey in isolation (“death … is the great uncertainty”). Once the reader is settled into the rhythms of Stefansson’s prose, we’ll go anywhere with him. We can even believe that an experienced sailor like Bardur might forget his waterproof suit as he rushes onto the boat because he was too busy reading Milton — a detail that, written down cold, would seem as implausible as the scene in Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday” when a violent robber is disarmed by a reading of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” It’s that forgotten suit that drives a scene of sustained tension in the first half of the book, as Bardur punches himself to keep warm while the ship races toward shore through the ice and snow and heaving sea.
What follows in the second half of the book — as the boy sets out on an ambiguous mission — is less focused but more generous in scope, expanding to other characters and showing the tentative romances and power structures in the village. But as is made clear by the scattered aphorisms (“to live is to question”) and literary references (one character saw Dickens give a reading; another believes he owns Wordsworth’s coffee mug), this turns out to be a book not about action after all, but about words. “We might not need words to survive,” we’re told; “on the other hand, we do need words to live.” And “words seemed still able to move people,” so “perhaps some hope yet remains, despite everything.” For those who agree, the good news is that “Heaven and Hell” is the first book in a trilogy, and there is more of this beguiling life to come.
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