Jón Kalman Stefánsson.JF Paga/Supplied
- Title: Your Absence Is Darkness
- Author: Jón Kalman Stefánsson
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Biblioasis
- Pages: 432 pages
You could categorize Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Your Absence Is Darkness as a generational novel – or, being Icelandic, a saga. But where many novels in that genre either proceed chronologically, or weave evenly back and forth in time, few attempt what Stefánsson does here: to collapse time completely.
Virtually unheard of in North America, Stefánsson is a well-known name overseas, where about half of his dozen or so novels have been translated into English. He’s won the Icelandic Literary Prize, been nominated for the Booker International Prize and, in previous years, been pegged by bookies as a strong contender to win the Nobel for Literature. (In 2018, he was nominated for the briefly lived “alternate Nobel,” the New Academy Prize in Literature, set up in the wake of the scandals rocking the award at that time.)
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He’s been dubbed the Icelandic Dickens, presumably for his humanistic impulses, and use of elaborate, interconnected storylines. But where Dickens’s narrators are often keenly drawn, the nameless one in Your Absence Is Darkness doesn’t even know himself. As it begins, he’s sitting in a church pew in a small town on a remote fjord, having just come to with a case of total amnesia.
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Shortly after, he’s approached by a woman in the churchyard. She seems to know him; indeed, is relieved to see him, and soon after sends him along to a local hotel where other forgotten friends are apparently waiting.
He goes there, and, in the illogical manner of a dream, hides the fact that he doesn’t recognize anyone; he hopes he can puzzle out his identity for himself based on the clues they drop over the course of their conversations.
That never quite happens. Instead, the narrator will spend much the rest of the novel, whose present-day sections are set during the pandemic, hanging out in a parked caravan with a whiskey-swilling, crepe-making, vaguely sinister priest, whom he first encountered at the back of the church.
The priest hands the narrator a sheaf of papers containing multiple web-like narratives set in various eras in mainly rural Iceland, that he (the narrator) apparently wrote himself. Throughout the novel, the papers act as a portal into which the narrator, and we, will keep dipping. The priest, meanwhile, takes on a guide role, testily answering the narrator’s questions about characters and tales ostensibly of his own creation. The priest is part Charon, part Ghost of Christmas Past. There are strong hints he may also be the devil (there’s a constant smell of sulfur about him, but no mention of a local gas leak).
His haranguing of the narrator to keep writing certainly presents as a kind of devil’s bargain: “Who you are is completely irrelevant. Where your life went. Your love and betrayal don’t matter here. What matters is that you continue with the stories you started. Hopefully, you’ve realized that you slow down time while you’re writing. But you’ve got to pay the price for it. That’s the deal.”
In the early going, the novel’s many narrative threads present as an impenetrable tangle. Like the narrator, we feel lost, discombobulated (for English readers, the unfamiliar Icelandic names add to this). Chapter sections begin with gnomic, all-caps subheadings like: “THE TRAIN PLATFORM CALLED LOSS AND THE TRAIN THAT IS ETERNALLY TAKING AWAY THE OBJECT OF YOUR DESIRE.” We’ll start to gain momentum within a story only to be suddenly flung into the midst of another.
What feels like a mire eventually hardens into a path, albeit a winding one. Readers with the patience to follow it will be rewarded with what feels like citizenship in the novel’s surprisingly seductive multiverse of sheep farmers, priests, fishermen and alcoholics.
Its keystone tale, set in the present day, concerns a musician, Eiríkur, who is potentially about to go to prison for drunkenly shooting at a passing truck. Like so much in the novel, whose logic is based on a mass playing out of the butterfly effect, the explanation for this bizarre act lies in the past.
Part of that past involves the story (my favourite) of Eiríkur’s great-great-grandmother, Guðríður, an uneducated farmer’s wife who, in the late 19th century, submits an article about the common earthworm to a prestigious scientific journal that so beguiles one of its editors, a parish priest, that he rides six hours to her doorstep in an act that will affect both their fates.
Parts of Your Absence Is Darkness would be cornily romantic – in an early story, a young woman breaks off her engagement after briefly glimpsing the blue eyes of a farmer she’s never met, then takes an eight-hour bus ride to go find him – were they not tempered by the novel’s compelling atmosphere of strangeness (buoyed by a fluid, sensitive translation by Philip Roughton). Its unconventional, at times radical structure aside, Your Absence Is Darkness is ultimately about recognizable human preoccupations: fate, death, love, connection and duty versus desire.
“It’s always more important to feel things than to understand them,” our priest-cum-devil says to the narrator at one point. That’s useful advice for approaching Your Absence Is Darkness, which feels, in a sense, like it teaches us to read it as we move along – if you’ll indulge me – as an earthworm might: blindly burrowing and occasionally moving toward the light.