In “Your Absence Is Darkness,” Jón Kalman Stefánsson contemplates curses transmitted from one generation to the next.
by Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson, begins with an assertion: “What matters and has a lasting effect on you, deep feelings, difficult experiences … can work its way so deeply into you that it’s pressed into the genes … thus shaping those yet to be born. It’s a law of nature.”The tale that follows, in a satisfactory translation by Philip Roughton, tests that thesis with a five-generation saga of a family line frayed by infidelity and longing.
Published in Icelandic in 2020, “Your Absence Is Darkness” is set against a country emerging from quarantine. To pass the time, one landowning character sends angry letters to the U.S. Congress; another has taken up reforestation. But the majority hang in passive anticipation of renewed commerce from tourists. Icelanders remember that business with foreigners helped them ascend from one of the poorest nations in the world to one of its wealthiest.
“Your Absence Is Darkness” is as much the story that bridges Eiríkur and Guoríour — who is unusual because she is a literate peasant — as it is the story of a writer attempting to complete it. The only way he’s able to is by slipping into fugue states and resurfacing with scores of densely filled pages. “It must have taken quite some time to write down,” he muses after the first time this occurs. “Weeks, one might have thought. Which, of course, doesn’t add up.
Why? What comes to distinguish Stefánsson as a raconteur is his ability to jolt his otherwise moribund stories to life with daffy predicaments. When Guoríour submits an essay about earthworms, “the blind poets of the soil,” she is praised as an intellectual commoner and bedded by the editor of a literary journal.
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