Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

Iceland is in many ways a forbidding place, a land of extremes. Nearly treeless, its landscape is at once harsh and embracing. The winters are nearly totally dark, the summers the opposite—the sun barely sets. The snow of the cold months gives way to pervasive green, punctuated by the black of the volcanic stone of which the island is made.

Iceland’s language is ancient, the living and breathing descendant of Old Norse, and is only spoken by the three-hundred-thousand-plus people who live there. Perhaps because of this, Iceland is a very literary country, starting with the sagas of the Vikings, and continuing to the present. One Icelander, Halldór Laxness, won the 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature. His most well-known novel, Independent People, paints a stark picture of the toughness of character it takes to scratch out a living as a farmer from the barely yielding Icelandic soil.

Laxness’s countryman, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, may be following in his footsteps. A prolific writer, with fourteen novels and three books of poetry under his belt, Stefánsson was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for his novel Fish Have No Feet in 2017 and has been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize four times.

Stefánsson’s 2007 novel Himnaríki og helvíti (Heaven and Hell) has now been published in English. It, too, deals with the harshness of making a living in Iceland, this time as a fisherman.

The story takes place in the early Spring of a year, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. The central character is a boy—an orphan who is never named—living in an isolated fishing camp as a member of a six-man fishing-boat crew. He is close friends with one crew member, a young man named Bárður. The rest of the crew are much older, task-hardened men who have spent their whole lives rowing out in all sorts of weather to catch enough cod to sell to make a living. Stefánsson details the struggle that fishing in these far-northern waters in a small boat requires with frightening vividness.

But the boy and Bárður are outsiders, especially in their love of books, which the other men find strange. Bárður has borrowed a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost from a man in the nearest town, which is hours away by foot (the only way to get there). One day, distracted by his thoughts on the poem, Bárður forgets his oilskin and freezes to death during a storm at sea. The boy is devastated. His will to live has been shattered. His only thought is to return the book to its owner. He leaves for the town, walking alone in a late snowstorm.

The town is a far cry from the fishing camp in many ways. There, the boy meets a series of people whose lives and thoughts are far more complex than those of the fishermen. Aided by his exposure to these people, the boy tries to make sense of where his life should go, if it should continue at all.

What makes Heaven and Hell so outstanding is its voice. It is like nothing else. Unique in an indescribable way. Stefánsson’s sentences come close to stream of consciousness, but so much more deeply, as he mines the emotions and perceptions of each character, conveying the confusions and anxieties of each with penetrating force. The end result is a hypnotic narrative that is nearly impossible to tear oneself away from.

Heaven and Hell, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton, is published by Biblioasis.