THE SORROW OF ANGELS

Delivering mail to remote Icelandic farms becomes a struggle for survival against the crushing forces of nature.

Three weeks have passed since the tragic incidents in Heaven and Hell, the first installment in Stefánsson’s Trilogy About the Boy. Now, in the second, the eponymous main character, who had planned to kill himself in despair after the accidental death of his friend, is finding a reason to live again in his village in northwestern Iceland. The unnamed, orphaned boy has found a new family with Geirþrúður, an older woman whose independence unsettles the village’s male leadership, and with the strays she’s welcomed into her stately home. Geirþrúður detects a sensitivity in him that’s unlike the men around her; she plans to give him a good education and help him make his way in the world. But first the boy is enlisted to help the postman Jens in the perilous task of delivering mail to remote farms in the frostbitten north. The pair find themselves trudging across wind-blasted heaths and mountains with zero visibility in the falling snow (“the sorrow of angels”). Each carries internal conflicts with him: Jens is afraid to admit his love for Salvör, a farmer’s maid with an unhappy romantic past; the boy feels sadness for his dead friend and attraction to a flirtatious shopgirl who’s leaving the village soon. Nature’s humbling power, Stefánsson suggests, gives sharpened clarity to those with troubled hearts. But the monotony of the pair’s endless trek is reflected in the excessively long account of their journey, which ends frustratingly with a literal and figurative cliffhanger that dangles many questions. Will the boy’s love of literature blossom into a writer’s career? Will he find happiness? Meaning? Love? Readers must look ahead to the final book for answers.

“Some books are essential, others diversions,” the boy thinks to himself. This book belongs in the former category.