Heaven and Hell

Starred review from December 15, 2024
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 Stef�nsson'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 Reykjav�k, the sea gives them their lives--and can also take them away. Stef�nsson follows a character known only as "the boy" and his friend B�rdur, two young fishermen who are part of the crew of a small six-person boat. When an icy gale overtakes them on a voyage, B�rdur 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 inParadise Lost that he forgot to bring his waterproof. Stef�nsson renders the scene of the snowstorm and B�rdur 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 B�rdur and then kill himself. Such plot simplicity can be found in many of Stef�nsson's books, including the recently translatedYour 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. Stef�nsson 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 Stef�nsson's grim and inspiring tale.

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January 1, 2025
Set in rural Iceland during the early years of the twentieth century, Stef�nsson's brief, elegiac novel follows a bookish young man known only as "the boy" as he rows out on a fishing expedition one early April. He's accompanied by five other men, with "just a thin piece of wood between them and drowning." An unexpected snowstorm hits as they are fishing, and one of the men dies. Back on land, the boy, devastated, heads out in the snow with the goal of returning a translation of Paradise Lost to a blind sea captain in the village where the boy most recently spent time. While the boy's consciousness anchors the book, Stef�nsson (Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night, 2021) often slips away to the points of view of the other fishermen, the women who watch them leave, and the many villagers the boy gets to know. Written in dense, poetic prose, with more emphasis on mood than plot, the novel circles through the many ways of surviving in a harsh place.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.