Your Absence Is Darkness
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.
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Jón Kalman Stefánsson's novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
Philip Roughton is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness. He was the winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's The Heart of Man, and shortlisted for the same prize for About the Size of the Universe.
Praise for Your Absence is Darkness
"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
"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
"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)
"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
