Description
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2024 • A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
Praise for Your Absence Is Darkness
“‘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.”
—Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail
“Comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefánsson’s book, nor the uniqueness of his prose, rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton.”
—Daniel Mason, New York Times
“Stefánsson’s magnificent opus glows with the magic of the aurora borealis . . . Stefánsson unspools a vivid set of stories of people on the precipice of change, which cohere into an endlessly pleasurable narrative of self-discovery.”
—Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2024
“Stefansson uses the drama and comedy of everyday lives to dive into a broad range of topics: philosophy, music, faith, and even the science of earthworms.”
—New York Times
“Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mr. Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere . . . Questioning, vulnerable and openly sentimental, this is an absorbing commemoration of what the author calls the paradox that rules our existence, the vivifying joy and paralyzing sorrow of loving another person.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Roughton’s radiant English versions of Stefánsson’s novels about the Icelandic encounter with modernity have built into one of the glories of 21st-century literary translation. Craggily gorgeous yet fluid and tender, sometimes comic, they capture the books’ balance between the powers of nature and the passions of humanity with consummate skill . . . This novel with a colloquial, intimate, up-to-date voice boasts sturdy epic bones . . . Throughout, the rhythmic, idiomatic prose gives pulsing reality to people and place, as Stefánsson both cherishes his ramifying clan and warns that only imagination makes them live.”
—Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
“I couldn’t put it down.”
—The Washington Post
“[Your Absence Is Darkness] . . . lends itself to any number of superlatives: Masterful. Intelligent. Haunting. Biblical and modern in equal measure.”
—Literary Review of Canada
“Your Absence Is Darkness posits that we find happiness together even in that melancholy, using arts like music or literature to assert and explore our human connections, to forgive imperfection, and to thumb our noses at inevitability . . . its insights and gorgeously haunting prose make it a novel that fans of philosophic or metaphysical literature should experience.”
—World Literature Today
“With Your Absence Is Darkness now available in English (via translator Philip Roughton), Stefánsson offers a weighty yet light-saturated novel sure to leave a lasting impression. It is poetic and elegant, and it all starts when a man wakes up on a church pew and realizes he doesn’t know where—or who—he is.”
—Shelf Awareness, Best Books of 2024
“What makes this so irresistible is the narrator’s constant optimism as he probes profound questions from within the murk of his consciousness (‘Give me darkness, and then I’ll know where the light is’). Stefánsson is poised to make his mark on the world stage.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Stefánsson is a brilliant storyteller, and Roughton’s translation is well-done, capturing the meandering tone of the characters as they wander through the decades.”
—The Miramichi Reader
“Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s writing is steeped in love and loss; his stories are sorrow-soaked, the kind that linger.”
—Marcie McCauley, The /temz/ Review
“Inherited memories and legacies imprinted upon generations direct how a group of Icelanders accommodate the processes of living and dying in this unforgettable, brilliant novel. ”
—Lori Feathers, Electric Literature
“A . . . lyrical study of grief across decades.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The award-winning Icelandic author interweaves multigenerational stories often set in the country’s north and west . . . Stefánsson’s prose puts us right in the characters’ thoughts, feelings and sensations.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Your Absence is Darkness will be one of the best books you read this year . . . [it] expounds on themes of life, death, love, loneliness, mistakes, and the search for meaning. The eternal themes. Those which the great novels elucidate carefully but spectacularly in unmatched prose. Which is exactly the kind of novel this is.”
—Under the Radar Magazine
“A tale about life, death, and what we do with the time we are given in between the two . . . Stefánsson seeks to evoke is that the big picture isn’t for us to know, but something that is created, unknowingly, over the course of centuries.”
—Asymptote
“Jón Kalman Stefánsson is a poet . . . Your Absence Is Darkness is poetic and beautiful and so full of love and grief that it leaves no one untouched.”
—Morgunblaðið (Iceland)
“Incontestably this winter’s most beautiful title . . . Once again Stefánsson proves his exceptional talent.”
—Livres Hebdo (France)
“Stefánsson has created a masterpiece with this new novel. You don’t want it to end.”
—NDR Kultur (Germany)
“A wonderful family saga, pieced together through memories, myths, legends. Page after page, the characters emerge from the background, step closer, come alive. You just want to spend more time with them and never leave their world.”
—Corriere della Sera (Italy)
“During a time when no one can tell how things are going to turn out in this vast, dark world, Jón Kalman Stefánsson offers heart-wrenching wisdom, which purifies without placating.”
—Politiken (Denmark)
Praise for Jón Kalman Stefánsson
“Wistful and whimsical . . . [Stefánsson’s] writing is fertile, yielding extraordinary imagery. There are many tears in these stories and in this village, but there is also hope, because even unfulfilled dreams offer guidance, ‘they evaporate and settle like dew in the sky, where they transform into the stars in the night.'”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s lyrical style has earned him a dedicated following of readers in Iceland. [In] Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night each standalone story describes life in a small village in West Iceland, normal people—their insecurities and anxieties, their courage and loneliness. Together, these episodes create one, coherent whole; there’s no set narrator, but rather, it’s the village that tells these stories of hope, cruelty, life, and death.”
—Literary Hub
“Stefánsson is a superb storyteller with a metaphysical bent. He draws characters with empathy and wit, and frames their condition in existential dichotomies: modernity versus the past, mystical versus rational, destiny versus coincidence.”
—Booklist
“Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy.”
—Eileen Battersby, TLS
“The Icelandic Dickens . . . He has the same gift of writing with great understanding, an empathy with troubled souls and a skill at laugh-out-loud comedy.”
—Irish Examiner
“Inherited memories, legacies imprinted upon generations of Icelanders, determine how characters accommodate the processes of living and dying in this unforgettable, brilliant novel. Narrated by a man who has returned home with almost no memory of his old life or friends, Stefansson explores heartbreak, loneliness, and most of all hope. The writing, whether about people or place, is descriptively and emotionally rich. As a saga of small-town life, the book is replete with wonderful stories of mostly ordinary (and a few remarkable) people, their lives legendary to all who fondly remember them. It is difficult to imagine how there could be a book published in 2024 that I will love more than Your Absence Is Darkness, by Jón Kalman Stefánsson.”
—Lori Feathers, Interabang Books
“Your Absence Is Darkness feels like diving into the cool waters of the ocean, only to find treacherous waves and jagged, unavoidable bedrock . . . This isn’t so much a novel as it is a vision quest for meaning against the endless tides of fate. A journey to the core of love and death, and of life itself. It wrecked me; it turned me into a poet and a poem. It made me want to sing while I still can. Anyone bold enough to revel in Death’s Playlist will be well rewarded even as they are left in ruins.”
—Mira Akbar, Dudley’s Books
“I guess I’m a romance reader now. Your Absence Is Darkness explores the idea that the world is measured, ordered and ultimately blown to pieces by love. that there are two kinds of transcendent love, one stolid, ‘boring’ and enduring as a fence post. the other passionate and destructive to everything around it. The world gets caught in the middle of these two loves and is alternately upheld and upset. This is the search for ‘true’ happiness that all mortals face.”
—Douglas Riggs, Bank Square Books
“Add Your Absence is Darkness to the ever-growing pile of Icelandic classics. This deeply moving novel—full of love, stories large and small, and unforgettable characters—caresses and crashes like the waves against the island’s shores.”
—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
“You start this book as you would a stroll through an open meadow, but although the path seems smooth, you can never quite find your footing. Focusing on the pleasant ground, you become distracted, and when you look up at last, you find yourself in a deeper, darker region. You’re unsettled and unsure, but exhilarated—you can’t possibly stop now.”
—James Crossley, Madison Books
“Melancholy and memory, life and love, death and desire, philosophy and possibility. Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Your Absence Is Darkness is an achingly gorgeous novel spanning several generations full of longing, heartbreak, hard choices, and a yearning for happiness and connection. With lyrical prose, thoughtful tangents, and a meandering, moving examination of being human amid hardship and responsibility, Your Absence Is Darkness feels as close to living as perhaps any novel could aspire to. Stefánsson writes with humor, compassion, tenderness, and wisdom. This is as fine a novel as they come.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books
“Called the ‘Icelandic Dickens,’ the author has released numerous award-winning novels in his home country. Your Absence Is Darkness may be one of his best, according to reviewers. The story of a man who comes to in a church without a memory of his past offers an intriguing visit to the history of Iceland, through the eyes of a man who is known—by a wife, a sister-in-law and others—but who does not remember any of them. Some major concepts about human experience are set forth in the narrative. The author’s metaphysical thoughts are on full display and will really get you to thinking. It is well-worth the read.”
—Linda Bond, Aunties Bookstore
