We’re back to the Nordics: these are my sixth, seventh and eighth reads for Annabookbel’s NordicFINDS challenge, and I’ve actually now finished reading eight of the ten books I selected for the challenge, which lasts until 6 February. I have started “The Book of Reykjavik” and won’t finish the massive saga book by the end of Sunday but have actually got it off the shelf and finished one saga out of it, which I’m calling a win.

I bought the last book in the trilogy in November 2016 at Any Amount of Books on the Charing Cross Road on a trip to London with Heaven-Ali where we met up with three LibraryThing Virago Group friends, including blogger Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings (report here and I have at least read all the books from that trip!). I then sourced the other two volumes online but then wickedly left them in my Pile on my shelf until January 2022!

Jon Kalman Stefansson – “Heaven and Hell”

(16 June 2017)

Poetry kills, it gives you wings, you flap them and feel the fetters. It leads you into another world, and then yanks you back, into a storm, into the dinginess of the commonplace. (p. 233, “The Sorrow of Angels”)

We start off with a grim but rather wonderful novel. The frame is narrated by a chorus of restless ghosts, caught for some reason between life and death (they think they’re going to be released by telling their story but I’m not sure they actually are). A Bookish Beck serendipity moment, too, there. We go back about a century to a village and its fishing village outpost: “The boy” (never named; he tells someone but not us his name in the third volume), an orphan who has also lost his sister and become separated from his brother, watches as his only friend dies in the fishing boat they both work on, freezing to death because he forgot his waterproofs as he was reading “Paradise Lost”. That kind of sums up the trilogy right there. Prostrated with grief, he flees to the village, meaning only to return the book to a blind sea-captain before ending his own life, however a vivid cafe owner, her servant and the captain hold him back and keep him in this world, and soon he notices the shop owner’s daughter. Incredibly atmospheric and more than a bit creepy.

Jon Kalman Stefansson – “The Sorrow of Angels”

(7 June 2017)

The boy makes headway with his shop owner’s daughter and has exciting plans afoot for his education, but first he somehow ends up going off with Jens, the postman, on an increasingly hideous and bleak journey, grim and miserable in the snow (the snow being the angels’ tears), staying at poverty-stricken and diseased farms, getting worse and worse until, just before the literal cliff-hanger at the end, they end up helping transport a coffin complete with body (and an uncanny one at that) through the snow towards the churchyard. The chorus of the dead is still with us, narrating away, as the amazing descriptions make us feel we’re with the boy and Jens every step of the way.

Jon Kalman Stefansson – “The Heart of Man”

(19 November 2016 – Any Amount of Books)

I will admit this is where I started to flag. We start a day after the end of the last book, holed up in another kindly home and with a flame-haired woman for the boy to get all interested in. Will he forget his shop owner’s daughter or try to love them both? Is she somehow too close to Jens? Well. Working their way by boat back to the village, things are all up in the air, newfangled steamers coming in, the old guard fading away, the schoolmaster who is supposed to be teaching the boy always drunk now it’s the horrible, light summer … Running water and a telephone line come to the town; the boy writes two letters which have a huge effect on two people’s lives. Many people suffer horrible fates, assault, rape and death, the latter self-inflicted or happening through massive errors. Worse, there are three sets of affecting animal deaths (lots of human ones in the first two books, this was more upsetting). Affairs of the heart and business roll on, the boy loses his virginity, some of the threads of the several story arcs are tied up and it all ends inconclusively, but I’d flagged seriously by then and lost my impetus, though I did finish it.

Stefansson is an incredible writer, an heir to Halldor Laxness in his portrayal of eccentrics in small communities with unearthly, uncanny happenings. But these books were unremittingly grim, I have to say (surely there are more jolly books published in Iceland that just don’t get translated because audiences expect grim?) and you need a strong head and stomach to approach them. Philip Roughton does an excellent job and includes useful footnotes about the translations of various English-language works or bits in cod-Danish that appear in the text.

In Bookish Beck Serendipity moments: 1) the book is framed by a narrating chorus of trapped ghosts – in the first person plural, just when I claimed when reviewing “Brown Girls” that I had never read anything in this voice! 2) Slightly more prosaically, perhaps, The Boy feels at one point in the first novel like he’s in a book, it’s the only way he can make sense of his situation, and Joyce in “The Man Who Died Twice” (review to come) almost simultaneously claimed that she felt like she was in a novel (but if she was, she betted her hip wouldn’t hurt as much).

These were my sixth, seventh and eighth NordicFINDS read and were set in Iceland (in Iceland week!).

These were TBR Challenge 2021-22 Quarter 2 Books 4-6/53 – 47 to go. I need to read just under six per month to get all the books gone in a year, so I’m reasonably pleased with my progress.