A shimmering lesson about the vitality of human relationships shines through Stefánsson’s grim and inspiring tale.
A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place.
“There is almost nothing as beautiful as the sea on good days, or clear nights, when it dreams and the gleam of the moon is its dream,” says the narrator in Stefánsson’s revelatory novel, newly translated from Icelandic by Roughton. Don’t let those poetic words fool you. For the fishermen of an unnamed Icelandic village many miles from Reykjavík, the sea gives them their lives—and can also take them away. Stefánsson follows a character known only as “the boy” and his friend Bár∂ur, two young fishermen who are part of the crew of a small six-person boat. When an icy gale overtakes them on a voyage, Bár∂ur realizes he’s made a fatal mistake. A young poet who fills women, especially his boat captain’s wife, with romantic longing, he was so absorbed in Paradise Lost that he forgot to bring his waterproof. Stefánsson renders the scene of the snowstorm and Bár∂ur freezing to death with a clarity and eye for detail worthy of Conrad. Numb with grief, the boy—who lost his entire family years ago and now his closest friend—later leaves the fishing huts with one goal in mind: to return the book to the man who loaned it to Bár∂ur and then kill himself. Such plot simplicity can be found in many of Stefánsson’s books, including the recently translated Your Absence Is Darkness (2024), and this approach enables him to dive deep, like the cod “that have swum the seas for 120 million years,” into philosophical questions about life and death. Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he’s not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations. The logic of the boy’s simple decision to die—“before him is utter uncertainty…kill himself, then all the uncertainty is behind him”—is unexpectedly challenged by those he meets when he returns the book. The boy knows the world is full of tragedy, but there’s also much tenderness and warmth, just like the hot coffee and buttered rye bread waiting when someone comes in from the cold.
A shimmering lesson about the vitality of human relationships shines through Stefánsson’s grim and inspiring tale.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781771966511
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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