​Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Your Absence is Darkness

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Biblioasis, 2024)

Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s writing is steeped in love and loss; his stories are sorrow-soaked, the kind that linger. “But wouldn’t you say that we need sadness sometimes, in one way or another?”

Although Stefánsson’s published more than a dozen books in Iceland since 1988—some poetry, mostly prose, including two trilogies of novels--Your Absence is Darkness is only his second English translation in North America. It follows the 2020 publication of Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night in 2020, which claimed the Icelandic Literature Prize more than a decade earlier.

Both English translations are Philip Roughton’s, who’s described by the author as having “all the qualities one could want in a translator,” when Fish Have No Feet was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. (Fish is available outside North America in English translation, along with four other novels.)

Translating Stefánsson’s fiction requires attention paid to style, atmosphere, and rhythm, and “a poet’s sensitivity for language and that’s where Philip’s strength lies,” the author observes; reading Stefánsson’s fiction also requires appreciation of all these elements—and, patience.

Many of the sentences in Your Absence Is Darkness are long. Even at the sentence level, there is a determination to capture something essential, precisely observed. Consider strings of adjectives like this one—“quickly, firmly, and impertinently”—which describes how one person looks at another, each word contributing a unique element to the scene.
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Across hundreds of pages there are strings of characters, too. The first whom readers meet is a man who cannot remember himself, in a section titled “Tell My Story and I’ll Get My Name Back, or in other words: The First Opposition.” To whom is this man in opposition, readers wonder. Perhaps to the other man who’s nearby. Perhaps to the writer. Perhaps to readers. In an interview with Biblioasis, Stefánsson says: “There's a universe that opened up for me and all kinds of people came out of the darkness.”

Perhaps it is not a single character who stands in opposition but the novel itself. Later in the novel, Stefánsson obliquely comments on writing:

Write. And we won’t forget.
Write. And we won’t be forgotten.
Write. Because death is just another name for being forgotten.

​Perhaps this matter of opposition is an unanswerable question. From the first page, the novel demands readers be willing to inhabit uncertainty, willing to experience the openness that characterises the author’s writing process.

Readers are not alone—the writer offers himself as guide. (In much the same way as the other man, at the beginning of the novel, offers himself to the unnamed seeker.) But more as a companion than an authority.

But slow down a bit, there’s a catch, there’s a story here, there are destinies, which is why we need to go back a bit, into the past, to where we all come from, from where we’re all descended, where most explanations are to be found, where it all begins. Let’s go back in the hope of understanding better, and to get our bearings. So slow down a bit. Or rather, let’s slow down time. It’s impossible to tell the story otherwise.

Readers are urged to embrace a conceptual slowing, to accept the storyteller’s advice. And, then, the tone shifts from a directive to an invitation: let us move together. And, then, the intent shifts from not merely affecting readers to broadening storytelling’s impact: readers can choose to give power to the story. It’s the kind of debate that emerges early in the text with references to philosophers and thinkers: how do we engage, how do we endure.
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What happens next? Time itself becomes a character. All those characters who came out of the darkness, when Stefánsson began to write this novel, require an investment of time, yes—and so does time itself. 

And three hands on each clock, because it takes at least three to keep track of time. The thinnest hand is constantly in motion, it never stops, dashes bewilderedly, breathlessly, even desperately around and around, pursuing what it can never catch, what perpetually gets away, though always just barely. Thin, if not emaciated from all the toil. The medium-sized hand moves slightly slower. It appears calm, but that’s an illusion, because it’s constantly quivering with inner tension. Knows that it can never rest, driven along by the restlessness of its thinner brother. The third, however, moves so slowly that it has put on weight in its leisure.

The novel is structured like multiple clock hands spinning around a nexus: bewilderment and breathlessness, a quivering and a restlessness, desperate pursuit and perpetual escape.
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Simultaneously, there are elements of solidity afforded to readers. The setting in Iceland is described in detail and the passing of seasons is another way for readers to experience time, to breathe deeply: 

I roll down the driver’s-side window to let in the month of August, sunshine, the smell of the earth, the sea, the tall birch thicket that shades the farm, the whinny of the snipe, the blaring of the redshank and the screeching of the tern that will all soon leave this fjord.

The scenes in which key characters meet are ripe and full, easily visualized and emotionally resonant. The author’s investment in character is evident from the beginning and their relationships are the foundation upon which readers engage, first.

In interview with Biblioasis, Stefánsson describes the opportunities that emerge creatively as he, himself, engages with the characters. One in particular—Guðriður, who writes a remarkable essay in the nineteenth century about the nature of earthworms and their passage beneath the Earth’s surface—reverberates throughout the novel and beyond: “Today, she would go to university and be a scientist. At that time, there was no chance in hell. So maybe I was trying to give her a second chance, and I believe that you can do that in fiction.”

Stefánsson also invites readers to engage with the world beyond the story. Early in the novel, references to both music and literature are specific invitations to seek out other art forms, to connect: “I always put other writers in my book because I'm hoping that they will expand it and say something about the character, but I am also hoping that readers will pick up those writers and start to read them.” In the back of the novel is a playlist of dozens of songs that characters value: “If something can save the world, apart from poetry,” Stefánsson  says, “then it's music.” (Death’s Playlist)

Connections sustain us. Even when we grieve and mourn disconnections, the remaining connections—with art, with other people and animals, with ideas, with music, with the land—preserve us. 
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Readers listening to, musing on, and reading Your Absence Is Darkness recognise the truth of the unspoken corollary—Your Presence Is Brightness. “Sadness is our memory of past happiness. It’s the history of mankind.”
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There is always one more question: “Why do we not write more about joy, since there are so many happy people in the world?” Whether we need sadness or joy more, questions like these make us lifelong readers, lifelong seekers; writers like Stefánsson keep us company in the darkness.

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Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit - land still inhabited by their descendants.