A shimmering lesson about the vitality of human relationships shines through Stefánsson’s grim and inspiring tale.
A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place.
“There is almost nothing as beautiful as the sea on good days, or clear nights, when it dreams and the gleam of the moon is its dream,” says the narrator in Stefánsson’s revelatory novel, newly translated from Icelandic by Roughton. Don’t let those poetic words fool you. For the fishermen of an unnamed Icelandic village many miles from Reykjavík, the sea gives them their lives—and can also take them away. Stefánsson follows a character known only as “the boy” and his friend Bár∂ur, two young fishermen who are part of the crew of a small six-person boat. When an icy gale overtakes them on a voyage, Bár∂ur realizes he’s made a fatal mistake. A young poet who fills women, especially his boat captain’s wife, with romantic longing, he was so absorbed in Paradise Lost that he forgot to bring his waterproof. Stefánsson renders the scene of the snowstorm and Bár∂ur freezing to death with a clarity and eye for detail worthy of Conrad. Numb with grief, the boy—who lost his entire family years ago and now his closest friend—later leaves the fishing huts with one goal in mind: to return the book to the man who loaned it to Bár∂ur and then kill himself. Such plot simplicity can be found in many of Stefánsson’s books, including the recently translated Your Absence Is Darkness (2024), and this approach enables him to dive deep, like the cod “that have swum the seas for 120 million years,” into philosophical questions about life and death. Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he’s not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations. The logic of the boy’s simple decision to die—“before him is utter uncertainty…kill himself, then all the uncertainty is behind him”—is unexpectedly challenged by those he meets when he returns the book. The boy knows the world is full of tragedy, but there’s also much tenderness and warmth, just like the hot coffee and buttered rye bread waiting when someone comes in from the cold.
A shimmering lesson about the vitality of human relationships shines through Stefánsson’s grim and inspiring tale.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781771966511
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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