The Bibliophile: Tell me it’s not healthy to read books
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I wrote a little bit in a previous installment of the Bibliophile about my excitement for Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton, so I’ll keep this intro brief. I don’t think it’d be anything groundbreaking to say that most—if not all, hopefully—of the folks reading this are fans of books, and Heaven and Hell is at its core a paean to the power of books and the friendships and communities that coalesce around them. Stefánnson’s characters memorize lines from a poem before heading out to sea, read to each other aloud to stave off the darkness, and quietly come together to think and dream in silent companionship. They save each other and themselves again and again with literature.
Heaven and Hell is a story for anyone who’s felt saved by books, and we hope you’ll enjoy a glimpse of this in the following excerpt.
Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant
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Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.
The Boy, the Sea and the Loss of Paradise
I
Bárður and the boy sometimes catch a glimpse of the group ahead of them and modify their pace in such a way that they draw farther apart rather than closer together, the two of them travel by themselves, it’s best that way, so much that needs to be said intended for just the two of them, about poetry, about dreams and the things that cause us sleepless nights.
They have just crossed over the Impassable. From here it is approximately a half-hour’s walk home to the hut, for the most part along the stony beach where the sea snaps at them. They stand high up on the slope, put off the descent, look out over more than ten kilometres of cold blue sea that tosses and turns as if impatient at the head of the fjord, and at the white beach opposite. The snow never fully leaves it, no summer manages to melt the snow completely, and still folk live wherever there is even a trace of a bay. Wherever the sea is fairly accessible there stands a farm, and at midsummer the little home-field surrounding it turns green, pale green areas of tussocky ground stretch up the mountainside and yellow dandelions kindle in the grass, but even further away, to the north-east, they see more mountains rise into the grey winter sky: these are the Strands, where the world ends. Bárður removes his bag, takes out a bottle of brennivín, they both have a gulp. Bárður sighs, looks off to the left, looks at the ocean itself, deep and dark, he doesn’t think at all about the end of the world and the eternal cold, but instead about long, dark hair, how it blew in her face in early January and how the most precious hand in the world brushed it aside, her name is Sigríður, and Bárður trembles a bit inside when he speaks the name to himself. The boy follows his friend’s glance and sighs as well. He wants to accomplish something in life, learn a language, see the world, read a thousand books, he wants to discover the core, whatever that might be, he wants to discover whether there is any core, but sometimes it’s hard to think and read when one is stiff and sore after a difficult fishing voyage, wet and cold after twelve hours’ working in the meadows, when his thoughts can be so heavy that he can hardly lift them, then it’s a long way to the core.
The west wind blows and the sky slowly darkens above their heads.
Dammit, the boy blurts out, because he is standing there alone with his thoughts, Bárður has set off down the slope, the wind is blowing, the sea churns and Bárður is thinking about dark hair, about warm laughter, about big eyes bluer than the sky on a clear June night. They have come down to the beach. They clamber over large rocks, the afternoon continues to darken and press in on them, they keep going and hurry the final minutes, and are a hair’s breadth ahead of the twilight to the huts.
These are two pairs of new-ish huts with lofts located just above the landing, two sixereens overturned on the beach and lashed down. A large, rough crag extends into the sea just beyond the huts, making landings there easier but overshadowing the main fishing huts, which are a half-hour’s walk away, thirty to forty huts and more than half of them fairly new like theirs, with sleeping lofts, but a number of them from a former time and one-storeyed, the crews sleep and bait the lines and eat in the same space. Thirty to forty buildings, perhaps fifty, we don’t remember exactly, so much is forgotten, confused: we have also learned little by little to trust the feeling, not the memory.
Dammit, nothing but adverts, mutters Bárður. They have entered the hut, gone up to the loft, sit on the bed, there are four beds for the six men and the Custodian, the woman who takes care of the cooking, the wood-burning stove, the cleaning. Bárður and the boy sleep head-to-foot, I sleep with your toes, the boy says sometimes, all he has to do is turn his head and his friend’s woollen socks are in his face. Bárður has big feet, he has pulled his feet up beneath him and murmurs, nothing but adverts, meaning the newspaper published in the Village, which comes weekly, is four pages long, the last page frequently covered with advertisements. Bárður lays the paper aside and they finish removing from their bags everything that makes life worth living if we exclude, in their case, red lips, dreams and soft hair. It’s not possible to put red lips and dreams into a bag and carry them into a fishing hut, you can’t even buy such things, yet there are five shops in the Village and the selection is dizzying when things are at their best at midsummer. Perhaps it will never be possible to buy what matters most, no, of course not, that is unfortunately not the case, or, to put it better, thank God. They have finished emptying their bags and the contents lie on the bed. Three newspapers, two of them published in Reykjavík, coffee, rock candy, rye bread, sweet rolls from the German Bakery, two books from the library of the blind old sea captain—Niels Juel, Denmark’s Greatest Naval Hero and Milton’s Paradise Lost in the translation of Jón Þorlaksson—in addition to two books they had bought jointly at the Pharmacy from Dr Sigurður, Travelogue of Eiríkur from Brúnum and Jón Ólafsson’s textbook of the English language. Sigurður has a pharmacy and bookshop in the same house, the books smelling so much of medicine that we are cured and freed from ailments simply by catching a whiff of them, tell me it’s not healthy to read books. What do you want with this, asks the Custodian, Andrea, picks up the textbook and starts leafing through it. So we can say, I love you and I desire you in English, Bárður replies. That makes sense, she says, and sits down with the book. The boy came with three bottles of cure-all, one for himself, one for Andrea, the third for Árni, who hadn’t arrived yet, same as Einar and Gvendur, they had planned to spend the day visiting various huts, rambling, as it’s called. Pétur the skipper, on the other hand, spent the entire day in the hut, cleaning his waterproofs and rubbing them with fresh skate liver, mending his sea-shoes, went out once to the salting house with Andrea, they spread a sail over the ever-growing saltfish stack, it has grown so high that Pétur doesn’t need to bend over at all while they’re at it. They’ve been married for twenty years and now his waterproofs hang down below, hang among the fishing gear, a strong odour comes off them now but they will become soft and malleable when they set out tonight. A tidy man, that Pétur, like his brother, Guðmundur, skipper of the other boat, about ten metres between their huts but the brothers don’t speak to each other, haven’t done so in a good decade, no one knows why.
A splash of colour greets the reader upon opening.
Andrea puts down the book and starts heating coffee on the stove. There had been absolutely no coffee that morning, which is truly troublesome, and in a short time the aroma of coffee fills the loft, it slips down and overwhelms the odours of fishing gear and unwashed waterproofs. The trapdoor lifts and Pétur comes up with his black hair, his black beard and his slightly slanting eyes, his face like tanned hide, comes like the Devil from down in Hell up here into the Heaven of coffee, with an almost cheerful expression, it’s no small thing what coffee can accomplish. Pétur smiled for the first time when he was eight years old, Bárður once said, and the second time when he first saw Andrea; we’re waiting for the third time, concluded the boy. The trapdoor lifted again, the Evil One is seldom alone, muttered the boy, and the space appeared to shrink after Gvendur came all the way up, so broad-shouldered that no woman could embrace him properly. Einar follows at his heels, half as large, thin but incredibly strong, incomprehensible whence this slender body derives its power, perhaps from savageness, because his black eyes even shoot sparks in his sleep. So there you are, says Andrea, and pours coffee into their mugs. Yessir, says Pétur, and blathered away the entire day. They don’t need an entire day to do that, says the boy, and the mugs in Andrea’s hands shake a bit as she suppresses a laugh. Einar clenches his fists and shakes them at the boy, hisses something so unclear that barely half of it can be understood, he is missing several teeth, his dark beard imposing, grown halfway over his mouth, his ragged, thin hair nearly grey, but then they drink their coffee. Each sits on his own bed and the sky darkens outside. Andrea turns up the light in the lamp, windows at both gables, one frames a mountain, the other the sky and sea, they frame our existence, and for a long time nothing is heard but the surge of the sea and the pleasant slurping of coffee. Gvendur and Einar sit together and share one of the newspapers, Andrea scrutinizes the English textbook, trying to enlarge her life with a new language, Pétur just stares at nothing, the boy and Bárður both have their own papers, now only Árni is missing.
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From the Devil’s “Notes to Self”
A prose poem by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
translated by Philip Roughton
. . . discord, envy, borders, land mines, Trump’s phone number, Orban, Netanyahu and all the rest, burn the Koran in Copenhagen, or just anywhere, remember to buy new trousers, call Mom, more discord, never forget, also national purity, change is harmful, buy an album by the Bee Gees, tell Elon Musk that he’s the best, the smartest, the Great Wall of China’s an awesome idea, use that for a slogan, those who are dissimilar and different are a threat, every person must be his own Great Wall of China, could work as a slogan, a hot idea, remember my appointment with the physiotherapist tomorrow morning, arrogance is absolutely awesome, use it more often, remember praise, great idea to ban books, support it, important to call it by another name, spread that idea, call it thoughtfulness, that books shouldn’t be uncomfortable, the same with theater, music, emphasize that everything should be safe, mustn’t hurt, shock, awesome idea, on a par with the Great Wall of China, remember to buy a bottle of vodka for Dad, praise, jealousy, suspicion, vanity, put them as wheels beneath people, me doing the steering, I think it’s all on the right track, hardly anything that can stop us, more later . . .
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In good publicity news:
- Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) and On Book Banning by Ira Wells were both included in the Globe and Mail’s winter books preview.
- Question Authority by Mark Kingwell was featured in the Yale Daily News, and reviewed in The Record, which called the book “an excellent, challenging and, yes, funny read.”
- Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was featured in Vogue UK: “[A] unique, evocative take on the coming-of-age novel.”
