Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Impressions through the clouded lens of snowflakes, the eponymous sorrow of angels

Death, ever present, death.
Lurking in the murderous winter landscape, the roof of Hell.
Lurking in empty bellies and a cough that won’t stop.
Lingering in memories, dreams, and visions.
The dead, entwine with the living, urging some to live, but luring others towards death.

“Does one betray the dead by continuing to live?”
How to bear “the guilt of being alive and desiring life.”
By the anchoring bonds show more with family and friends who live.
By the power of promises, carried in hopeful hearts.

Life, tenacious but ephemeral, battles relentless hardship across the barren snow.
For what? Delivering letters. Letters. And the dead.
Optimism or idiocy - what’s the real difference?

Because “Words are the seventh wonder of the world.”
Words from one soul to another.
Words to change the world.
Assassins or saviours? Bullets or rescue teams?
Words from beyond the grave.
Words that may take postman Jens and the boy to theirs.
And then, after agonising survival, an oddly comic, but possibly deadly descent.

At the end of the world, coffee “warm as Heaven, black as Hell” may save, but liquor can slay.
There’s a fiercely independent woman serving both, her generosity hidden beneath the wings of her raven’s heart.
And a boy, who doesn’t want physical strength or reckless masculinity, but words and education.
If he lives.

Bodies: dead bodies, lost bodies, bodies reaching out, bodies making love.
A wet, glistening sweet, from one mouth to another and “A thousand years passed”.
Body parts:
“The heart is a muscle.”
“Shoulders of moonlight.”
And eyes.

So many eyes of every colour and kind: blue, flint-coloured, pearls, bulging boils, black... frozen puddles of death.
A tentative, tender kiss on the eyes.
Blind eyes that penetrate and see more than sighted eyes. One of many reasons not to judge from afar.
And yet “You can always know a person by where he or she looks… Eyes don’t lie.”

Snow blind, blind drunk, dead drunk, blindsight, snow.
But blind from lack of love? If love returns, will sight?

"And then the world goes out."
Stunning. Literally and literarily.
I was left snow blind; fed, but still hungry.
I crawled out of the shelter of my snow-cave, craving more.
More words. Words to change the world, to change me.
The world went out, and so did I - straight to The Heart of Man.

Quotes

No plot spoilers. They’re hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.

Words and Books


• “First it’s words that freeze, then life.”

• “Everything has to be called something” - except the nameless central, universal characters, “the boy” and “the Village”.

• “Some books are essential, others are diversions.” This is the former.

• “Read as naturally as you breathe… Read until you stop distinguishing between the text and yourself.”

• “Where words don't sit still on the page but instead fly to the sky and give us wings, even though we might not have sky to fly in.”

• “Shit is shit and fancy words don't change that. But they change you.”

• “A person who holds a pen and paper has the possibility to change the world.”

• “Power and wealth have never gone hand in hand with poetry, and that’s perhaps why it’s so incorruptible.”

• “Written words can have more depth than spoken ones… The paper is the fertile soil of the word.”

• “This word, sorry, which goes such a long way and is so substantial that it can be used to build many houses and many bridges.”

• “This wonderful smell of books and dust like Heaven.”

• Kierkegaard is “dangerous… He threatens to change us, he makes us doubt, he forces us to reconceive the world… We prefer agreeableness to provocation, abstraction to stimulus, numbness to stimulation.”

• “This boy vanished into the poetry, was hardly aware of the storm… recited the poems out loud to himself, recited them like magic incantations and beheld another world… Poetry kills, it gives you wings, you flap them and feel the fetters. It leads you to another world, and then yanks you back, into a storm.”



Life and Death


• “Life is just a thread that becomes brittle and fragile in the cold.”

• “The downy soft embrace of death.”

• “He who dies never returns… Yet he who dies never leaves us completely… he who dies is both near and far.”

• “Human life is a vague tremor in the atmosphere; it passes by so quickly that the angels miss it if they blink.”

• “No-one died; that’s how stories can be superior to life.”

• Live to experience what the dead cannot.



Weather


• “In Iceland there’s never any spring… It’s winter and then comes reluctant summer.”

• “Listens to the silence between snowflakes.”

• “The wind, as transparent as time, is gone… and left behind an apologetic breeze.”

• “A gentle, immensely polite breeze.”

• “A summer evening with birdsong and eternal light and the red midnight sun smelted them into one.”



The Sea


• “The breath of the sea… the heavy aspiration of a senseless creature, this treasure chest and grave of thousands.”

• “The sea is grey and innocent-looking and seems not to have anything on its conscience.”

• “The sea is restless after the storms… It is slow to regain its composure, storing the weather inside it like a memory.”

• “The sea pants in the snowfall and drowned men plod along the seabed.”

• “The sea is full of drowned lives yet people only catch fish… the boy screams because we can’t row out onto the sea of death and fetch the ones we miss.”



Love


• “One must blow on the embers constantly to keep the fire alive… life, love, ideals; it’s only the embers of lust that one never needs to blow on.”

• “The heart needs to beat for others, otherwise it grows cold.”

• “Kisses can float like summer blossoms down into the depths of sleep.”



Eyes, Sight, Blindness


• “Kolbeinn… saw little until he lost his sight. Do I need to tear out my own eyes in order to see?”

• Kolbeinn “sits in his eternal darkness” and “directs the broken mirrors of his soul towards the boy”.

• A woman’s eyes “Often appeared to be full of rain and wet horses… just a glimpse of the woman filled one with hopelessness.”

• “Wrinkles like sunbeams extending from her eyes.”



Dreams


• “Man dies if you take his bread from him, but he withers without dreams.”

• “Listens to the dreams of the night trickle from his blood and disappear into oblivion.”

• “Dreams evaporate from him, ascend to Heaven where angels read them.”



Miscellaneous


• “We're in a leaky rowing boat with a rotten net, and we're going to catch stars.”

• “The end of the world… All roads lead away from here.”

• “Thousands of stars that twinkle like old poems over the land.”

• A butterfly is “a bit like life… Beautiful from a distance, but when you come close you see that it’s just a winged worm.”

• “Sometimes life isn't visible until you've come right up to it, and that's why we should never judge from a distance.”

• “All his life, since his father died, he’s been leaving, has never known where he was going but his dreams are about this, getting away.”

• “Lamps giving off decent light but leaving behind shadows… as if the world were torn apart in some places by the darkness.”



“Nothing is sweet to me, without you.”

Three-Volume Novel

This is not a trilogy; it’s one novel in three, very closely-related parts, covering just a few weeks:

1. Heaven and Hell, reviewed HERE.
2. The Sorrow of Angels, this book.
3. The Heart of Man, review HERE.

For a more concrete idea of setting, plot, characters, and writing style, see my overview HERE.

Image of snowflake contact lens:
http://ep.yimg.com/ay/1stepcontacts/white-snowflake-theatrical-contact-lenses-5..... show less

In this second part of the Heaven and Hell trilogy, the epic nature of the story by Icelandic author Jon Stefansson really comes to the fore. From beginning to end, we find ourselves in an almost alien-like snowstorm. And for most of the story, we follow the still unnamed 'boy' on a perilous journey together with the imposing but very silent postman Jens, to remote areas in Iceland, through that hellish snowstorm. The snowflakes are constantly flying around, interpreted as 'tears’ or the show more ‘sorrow’ of the angels (hence the title), and that says enough about the 'gloomy' nature of this novel. Jens and the boy regularly get into trouble and a few times it seems as if they are not going to survive. So, just like in the first part, death plays an important role, sometimes literally when they have to drag a coffin with a deceased woman along in the last part of their journey (just as hilarious and grotesque as in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner).
As a reader, you become more and more intrigued by the narrative style in this second part: it is intense, descriptive, but also reflective, with humor that regularly shifts to sarcasm. Eventually, you start to wonder who is talking here (that will only become clearer in the third part). But just like in the first part, this epic story includes a lot of reflection, both from the voice-over and in the thoughts of the ‘boy’. A lot about death, of course, in an almost poetic style that often made me think of the Spanish Grandmaster Javier Marias. “The boy thinks about Bárður and misses him. He who dies never returns, we’ve lost him, no power in the universe is able to bring us the warmth of a vanished life, the sound of a voice, the hand movements, the touch of humor. All the details that comprise life and give it validity have vanished into eternity, vanished only to leave an open wound in the heart that time gradually transforms into a swollen scar. Yet he who dies never leaves us completely, which is a paradox that comforts and torments at once; he who dies is both near and far.” More and more, friendship and love also slide into the picture, as a (vain?) antidote to death: both Jens and the boy struggle with the desire for an ‘other’, the first already marked by his own shortcomings and disappointments, the second still clearly very much naively feeling his way in that unknown territory. And against that background, on their hellish journey, they also regularly meet other figures, who are also marked by life, but sometimes still strive for that ‘more’. Well done. And finally, Stefansson regularly brings up the relationship between words and life, again as a (once again vain?) antidote to death. In the end, this second, epic part of the trilogy really tends towards metafiction, a second layer next to the existential one. Well done. show less

Angels weep. They weep at the tragedies humankind inflicts on itself. Their tears fall to the ground as snow, at least that’s what happens in Iceland. There it can snow so heavily that “it binds heaven and earth”.

The boy has felt safe for three weeks now, at least as safe as a person can feel in a new environment where food and shelter are actually provided. There is the nagging doubt of how long this can actually last. Meanwhile, there is the task of learning English, by translating show more Hamlet. What strange people live in this place.

Comfort will not last long, but then the dead below tell us it never can. Just as the boy was getting comfortable, having time to actually think about life, he was sent on a mission.

Jens the postman had to step into a new route to cover for a sick colleague. The only trouble was, while Jens was superb at crossing heaths and mountains through snow and sleet, he was terrified of water. This route required several crossing of bays and inlets. Jens did not know how to row.

The boy was sent along to help out with the rowing. The first portion was fifteen kilometres.

…the waves are an ever-changing growing landscape around the boat, they rise and fall, cold blue with a touch of green, not terribly large seen from land, not much larger seen from the deck of a ship, but those who sit in a rowing boat cannot avoid seeing the high seas in these waves, these big waves heave themselves higher than the boat and momentarily shut out the land around them; it’s incomprehensible, really, that the two men are able to stay afloat.

That was just the first stage on the trip. Across headlands and heath, while the angels wept above, the two struggled through hell to deliver the mail. There was death to be evaded and sometimes encountered along the route, there was the kind of bone chilling cold that leads to the delusion that it is better to just lie down in the snow and sleep, and in the end, there was a request that was impossible to deny.

Not since Haldor Laxness has anyone put into words the elemental forces that rule the island. Stefánsson does this and more. show less

If you expect a conventional novel, look elsewhere - "Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night" is anything but. It has a weird narrator (an almost omnipresence of a type (although it does not know everything so not exactly) but with a "we" voice which reads more like a chorus from a classic play than anything else) and it is a more of a collection of stories with connecting episodes (from that narrator voice) than an actual novel. Add the jumps in time between the different chapters/stories show more (the last one is not the last one chronological) and it almost does not feel like a novel. And yet, it somehow does - those connections and the references between the parts and the characters which show up in multiple parts. Maybe a better word would be chronicle or saga (although these tend to go chronologically) so that is not the correct type either. It is all of them and none of them...

The novel is the story of a small village in Iceland in the late 1980s (for the main story), filled with people who appear to be normal but as everyone else have something interesting in their life. A man who starts dreaming in Latin and decides to leave his work as the director of the local Knitting company and to become an astronomer. The company itself, existing only because it was needed by someone so he is reelected, ends up closing and leaving a lot of people in the small village unemployed; a man comes home after having vowed never to do that; love and lust gets exposed in ways noone expects. Each part adds more details to a story we thought we knew, adding missing pieces, clarifying, connecting. And somewhere in all that emerges the story of a village which is very Icelandic, very normal... and not normal at all. It is the village that emerges as the main character - all the people in it are the supporting cast which makes it alive.

I suspect that this novel won't be for everyone - between the narrator style, the disjointed narrative and the somewhat uneven parts (but then, not everyone's life can be interesting), it is a weird novel. I still cannot decide if I liked it a lot or if it annoyed me - but I am glad I read it and I am interested in exploring other books by the author. Plus a non-crime Icelandic novel was an interesting way to see Iceland. show less