Fish Have No Feet

Wonderfully meandering book rooted in Keflavik, a small community trying to recover in the present from the departure of an American airbase and the sale of fishing rights. Stepping back into family histories of fishing, families and emigration, love stories and terrible losses. Peppered with philosophical musings on identity, motherhood and knowing each other, alongside the dark humour of the unlikeliest restaurant name, obsessions with Revolver and the power of teen love. Unlike anything else I've read.

Image: Monument to Might (of the sea) by Steinunn Þórarinsdóttir on the outskirts of Sandgerði

"It all began with death… In every death, there’s a new life."
The heart is a muscle, light is kindled, the sea and snow enhance and limit life, eyes are vividly described, words and stories have mystical power, and angels look out over tussocks. Reading the first thirty pages was like snuggling into the welcoming embrace of a beloved grandparent. But like the aged relative, things are not quite as remembered.

This book deserves to be reviewed in its own right, but I can’t. Every page has a shadow of the white wings of the (separate) Heaven and Hell trio, that I reviewed here. There's familiarity in the language and themes, and the show more way phrases are reworked and repeated, acquiring the hypnotic power of liturgy.

But as I settled into the tangled timelines, I craved the simple, incisive, and more ethereal beauty of the passages set in the past, rather than the teenage angst, iconic music, mid-life crises, and socio-economic and political history of the more contemporary chapters. I was less interested in Ari and his narrating cousin than in their grandparents, Oddur and Margrét.

A Family History?

This is subtitled “A Family History”, but the family is wider than Ari and his immediate relatives. This is a Bildungsroman of a nation. Individuals relish and abhor the opportunities and pain of adolescence, plan and cultivate their place in the adult world, and look back with affectionate nostalgia, stained with regret. Women - and men - challenge the limitations and expectations of their traditional roles. And underpinning them all, Iceland shakes off the shackles of Danish and US imperialism and forges an independent identity in the iconic black lava of the land.

“A human being’s life becomes, at most, a few isolated notes without a melody, random sounds instead of music - which is why we’ve brought you this account of generations… So that you’ll know and hopefully never forget that everyone was once young, so you realise that sooner or later we all must burn, burn with passion, happiness, joy, justice, desire, because these are the fires that light up the darkness, that hold the wolves of oblivion at bay, the fires that heat up life, so that you don’t forget to feel.”

Plot and Themes

The major points of Ari’s life are revealed at the start, with details added in later chapters. He achieves his ambition of being a writer, but he’s a wordsmith who can never find the words to talk to his father. In his forties, he leaves his wife after a trivial argument and goes to Denmark. A couple of years later, he returns because his estranged father is dying. His own journey from discovering music, drink, and girls in the 1970s through to middle age in the 2010s has parallels in the lives of his grandparents and his fellow Icelanders.

The recurring themes are mostly similar to the Heaven and Hell trio, but with added music: words, stories, and truth; time, change, and memories; eyes, heart, fists, and embracing arms; snow; fish; regret; family, generations, and inheritance; political history; gender stereotypes and the changing role of women; battling depression and alcohol; finding happiness, love, life and death.

Quotes - Weather and Landscape
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· “Keflavik is a bright embrace in the darkness.”

· “In Keflavik there are three cardinal directions: the wind, the sea and eternity.”

· Black lava is “an old scream, and then moss-covered silence” and “that expletive of the soil”.

· “Spots of green grass: the lava’s dreams.”

· “The sea… larger than language… but… the sea has nothing to say… The sea probably understands its fish, and even, in its own way, feels for drowned souls, but it likely has neither understanding of nor interest in our wounds.”

· “By the sea, all sorrows are soothed. Nearly.”

· “The fjord itself is as short as a hesitation… The mountain that halts storms and calms the world: the nights can be so silent and still that the fjord fills with angels, the air with the gentle rustle of angels’ wings. Then it’s as if no one will ever die again.”

· “The wind awakes and adds blowing snow to the falling snow, the entire world… turns totally white as if he has driven into the thoughts of angels.”

· “Where’s the snow that illuminates the darkness, where’s the cold that fetches stars for us?”

· “It starts snowing again, placidly... as if the sky were dreaming.”

· “Snow, white fury that has fallen silent, is still, motionless, welcoming the moonlight and making so many things beautiful.”

· “It’s snowing. A white message sent from Heaven to us here in the blackest place, but the wind sweeps it aside and tears it to pieces as if to prevent us from reading what Heaven wanted to say to us.”

· “The rain is falling like melancholy, falling like a merciless sentence.”

· “The hail pours down like a punishment from Heaven, hard, tiny fists that lash me.”

· “The wind always seems able to swirl something up to dirty the sky, limit visibility: dry soil, dust, sea foam, disappointment, unemployment.”

· “The sky is blanketed with stars, it’s like musical score, it’s like what’s beautiful and what we desire.”

· Block of flats/apartments: “Exclamation marks above the harbour, the storage space for fishermen who are unable to go to sea.”



Quotes - Love, Memories, Regret
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· “Your name is carved into my heart with the knife of eternity.”

· Love “is the force that holds the plants in place, that causes the universe to expand and black holes to form. Human will is nearly powerless against this force… It is God’s answer to death, when the Lord failed to save humanity from the darkness of death and instead bequeathed it this peculiar light, this flame that has warmed people’s hands ever since and burned them to the ground, transformed slums into stairways to Heaven, palaces into desolate ruins, joy into solitude.”

· "Memories are heavy stones that I drag behind me. Is it heavy to remember? No, only what you regret or long to forget - regret is the heaviest stone."

· “I can hardly offer you happiness… oblivion is my embrace.”

· “The heaviness of driving past your own son as if he were a stranger.”

· “One of humanity’s greatest misfortunes that it’s quicker to forget than remember.”

· “If we don’t dare remember… we’re finished… We become distortions. We betray.”

· “The three strings of his instrument: loneliness, regret, longing.”

· “Remember to be grateful for your tears.”

· “Why isn’t it enough to be loved… Why doesn’t it heal our wounds?”



Quotes - Life and Death
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· “Life… is a ray of light that scratches the darkness, and then disappears.”

· Death’s eyes: “Pupils so black the night itself brightens around them… they’re like two graves.”

· “Stagnation is the sister of death.”



Quotes - Time
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· Wearing a watch is “like being handcuffed by time”.

· “Time changes all of us: it hurtles along while slowing us down.”

· “Time has no regard for people’s dreams; rather, it penetrates everything and eventually turns life into death.”

· “Those who can foresee the future are always taken for madmen.”

· “It isn’t always easy to remember time… It’s almost like hearing death’s footsteps” and if you think about it too much “it unsettles us… reminds us that life passes more quickly than we can understand.”

· “Most translations seem to age more quickly than their original texts… as if they’re bound more closely to their own time periods than the original works.”

· “Time changes everything, turning lustful messages into shopping lists, knickers into hoover bags.”

· “Every single event of the past… condemned to oblivion… solely because no one remembers it.”



Quotes - Words and Stories
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· “Life grows out of words, but death dwells in silence. This why we must continue to write, to narrate, to mutter verses and curses, and thereby hold death at bay for a while.”

· For Oddur, who is not a man of words, his “clenched fists were his love poem”.

· Poetry is “more closely related to music than to words… the longing of the heart or blood”.

· “The unsaid slips more swiftly into our hearts… We can silence words but not hints.”

· “No one knows which events deserve to be told…
Where should one stop in a story?”

· “The truth isn’t always as beautiful as the stories we tell.”

· “He'd read too many poems and thus lost sight of normality."
Isn't that partly why we read?

· “We cry because language is imperfect and fails to reach all the way down to the bottom-most depths of life.”

· “Poetry can undoubtedly save the world, but there are so few people who read it.”

· “What are our lives worth if no one wants to hear about them?”

· “Embrace must be the most beautiful word in the language. To use both arms to touch another person, encircle another person, unite with that person, momentarily, two people become one in the heavy currents of life, beneath an open, perhaps godless sky... We yearn to be embraced simply because we're human and the heart is a sensitive muscle.”



Quotes - Gender Roles
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· “My diploma is like a past misunderstanding, and I feel as if I’ve been deleted from life.” (A housewife.)

· “Women turn into targets whenever they try to step outside the cramped space assigned to them.”

· “She’s stuck at home with the children… He’ll play with the children… making everyone happy but her.”

· Parenthood, “The years when the world simultaneously shrinks considerably and expands infinitely”.

· “The sea is what makes us men, but the land is for you women… We meet on the shore.”
“The sea makes us men… The eleventh commandment.”

· “The truth is masculine” - as portrayed in the newspapers.

· “It’s hard to be a man when everything is failing.”

· “In the old days, when men were men… they had no time for safety… they never gave in and would rather chew on stones than show signs of weakness, such as feelings.”



Quotes - Other
No plot spoilers; hidden for brevity and easy scrolling.


· “Kindled streetlamps… robs you of stars and scenery.”
“Streetlamps that stand so close together almost as if they’re afraid of the dark.”

· “Sometimes we seek out pain… And plunge into our wounds.”

· “Her eyes, blue-grey, big, gleaming as if, just then, they’d attracted all the light of the world, sun and stars, moonlight and auroras.”

· “Sex, the primal instinct that we hide and trumpet simultaneously, admit and deny” though all life springs from it.

· Postcards: “They show us our dreams... Show us the illusion, and the things we don't dare look in the eye.”

· “Greed is humankind's black hole... Whoever wishes to rule the world must above all convince us that we always need more... to make us insatiable. Change us into addicts.”

· “The outside world recedes… her family tightens its grim… Sometimes beautiful words are no help whatsoever - instead, they gradually settle over her like delicate wrappings, envelop her, tighten around her, tighten and change her slowly but surely into a living mummy.” (Depression or the down of bi-polar disorder.)

· “Guilt can also gnaw at a person who hasn't done anything wrong. A person who doesn't understand anything

· “Her fatigue turns into grains of sand in her blood and the days stretch her nerves between them, transforming them into a vibrating string plucked by the hours.”

· “Thou shalt have no other God… In other words, thou shalt not see the world through anyone else’s eyes but Mine.”

· “Ari is troubled by the unpleasant suspicion… that he sees life, the world, through conclusions drawn by others… that we have so few autonomous thoughts - that our minds have too few of the ptarmigan that cut through the darkness of delusion with their white flight.”

· “A world without music is like the sun without light, laughter without joy, a fish without water, a wingless bird. Like being condemned to live on the dark side of the Moon, with a view of darkness and loneliness.”

· “Eyes that were like two pop songs, one composed by Lennon and the other by McCartney.”

· “Freckles like kisses.”

· “Listening to good music is like setting a direct course for happiness.”

· “Mornings… so still it’s possible to hear eternity.”



Icelandic Trivia

· Iceland sold its fish quotas, leaving towns with fisherman, boats, and a sea full of fish they were not allowed to fish.

· Beer was illegal in Iceland until 1989, even though red wine was permitted from the 1920s (less than a decade after prohibition was introduced in 1915) and spirits from the 1930s. Beer was strongly associated with Danes, and therefore unpatriotic in a country striving for independence from Denmark: BBC article about beer ban.

Words to Live By

The message I took was to strive to understand, to preserve memories by telling stories, and to seize happiness when I can, lest regret, which is the heaviest stone, weigh me down.
Do we “seriously try to understand other people” or just “make others see the world as we see it?”
“What use is intelligence if it isn't accompanied by understanding?”
“When do we tell what really happened, and what's the correct version of the world?”
”Happiness… is the only victory that matters”.
That’s not a selfish message; it’s happiness in general, including, but not limited to me. Claim happiness, my friends.

This is a good book, maybe even great one. I enjoyed it. But for me, it suffered in comparison with the utterly sublime Heaven and Hell trio, reviewed HERE, with links to my reviews of the individual volumes. Fish is the first in a new duo or trio. I hope to regain my full passion with the next part.

“No one… can walk on water, and that’s why fish have no feet.” show less

⭐⭐⭐⭐
This one's a slow burn—melancholic, poignant, all atmosphere. Stefánsson takes you through time, guilt, and memory against the bleak, beautiful backdrop of Keflavík, Iceland.
The prose is dense and lyrical. It's gorgeous but it makes you work for it. The narrative drifts between fragmented memories and landscapes, tracing grief and loss across generations. Keflavík feels alive in this—isolated, windswept, haunting.
You can't rush through this. It needs patience and immersion, but if you give it that, you get a deeply affecting meditation on how the past shapes us and how memory holds on.
If you're into atmospheric literary fiction that prioritizes mood over plot, this delivers. Just know the prose is as challenging as it show more is beautiful. show less

Another book I picked up in the library on the strength of vague memories of a few reviews several years ago, and my first experience of reading Stefánsson.

I found it interesting and enjoyable, but got a little distracted trying to work out exactly how the narrator is related to his friend Ari, the main protagonist - eventually one grandparent is described as common to both, but presumably part of the story was withheld deliberately for the sequel. The narrator has a comprehensive knowledge of Ari's youth in which their paths, including a string of casual jobs, coincided for long periods.

What remains emerges gradually from a fractured narrative whose chapters go backwards and forwards over a century, painting a vivid picture of an show more Iceland moving from a land of hardy fishermen and smallholders into a modern economy. This is all symbolised by the main location Keflavik, a former fishing port in the South West corner of the country that became a dead end town thanks to an American military base that eventually deserted it.

Ari does have biographical details in common with the author - in the modern part of the story he has just returned from Denmark, to which he fled after walking out of an apparently successful marriage.

I have yet to read [b:Heaven and Hell|12745352|Heaven and Hell|Jón Kalman Stefánsson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356485104l/12745352._SY75_.jpg|6513641], so I can't comment on how this compares to what many consider his best work, but I would like to read more by Stefánsson. show less

Fiskar hafa enga fætur eftir Jón Kalman lýsa endurminningum manns sem flúið hefur land en þarf að horfast í augu við fortíð sína og í raun sögu ættar sinnar sem mótar hann sem persónu, bæði skapgerð og viðhorf til lífsins, eftir að hafa borist fréttir að heiman.
Það er margt sem ég hreifst af í bókinni. Mér fannst til dæmis Jón gera vel þegar hann lýsir breytingum sem skekja Keflavík þegar kvótinn er seldur þaðan og málfarið var oft á tíðum gullfallegt og sumar setningarnar voru hreinasta sælgæti sem hægt var að kjamsa á.
Ég hef hrifist mikið af skrifum Jóns Kalmans en varð fyrir nokkrum vonbrigðum með þessa nýjustu bók hans. Málskrúðið var á köflum of mikið og ég var ekki show more að fatta áhrif tengingarinnar við forfeður afkomandans við nútímann show less

Auch dieser Roman von Jon Kalman Stefansson ist ein "Lebensbuch"..keiner schreibt so mitreißend, so klug und so originell von den elementaren "Dingen des Lebens"...stundenlang könnte man aus dem Buch zitieren.."welchen Wert hat unser Leben, wenn es niemand mehr gibt, dem wir erzählen können".. und die Frage, worauf es ankommt, was wertvoller ist, "Intelligenz mit einem IQ von 130" oder eher auf "Verständnis, Einfühlungsvermögen, Moral"..wird hier nicht nur gestellt, sondern erzählerisch packend umgesetzt.

Ze waren jong en woonden en werkten in het meest vergeten deel van IJsland, Keflavík. Ze wilden wat worden in de wereld. Ari bijvoorbeeld wilde met zijn gedichten de wereld veranderen. Maar al vanaf de eerste dichtbundel blijkt groot succes er niet in te zitten. Later verlaat hij zijn vrouw en drie kinderen en gaat naar Denemarken. Hij komt pas terug als zijn vader hem verontrustende berichten toestuurt. Het gaat allemaal niet gemakkelijk voor Ari, dat terugkeren naar IJsland. En als hij er eenmaal is, neemt hij eindelijk de tijd om naast de berichten van zijn vader ook de onlangs ontvangen brief van zijn stiefmoeder te lezen, die er een artikel heeft bijgevoegd van een vrouw die ze als tieners gekend hebben. Dan pas begrijpt Ari hoe show more groot de mislukking van zijn leven is. Tenminste, zo lees ik dit verhaal dat ons over de exacte afloop in het ongewisse laat. show less