Iceland is the hot country with the cold name. A popular tourist destination featuring thermal spas, volcanoes, and puffins galore, this tiny Nordic island nation has become a mecca for exotic film and television shoots due to its otherworldly landscapes and vistas. But for those wishing to truly understand what makes Iceland unique, the place to start is within the pages of its rich literary traditions.
When I made my first trip to Iceland in 1973, it was impossible for this wannabe writer to miss the special place authors and poets have in Icelandic society. No country’s identity is more steeped in its literature than this rocky, windswept island at the top of the world. The second most prolific publisher of books per capita, Iceland trails only Great Britain, a remarkable achievement for a nation with fewer people than Long Beach.
The ancient Norse language of Icelanders – virtually unchanged for a millennium – forms a living link from the 12th-century sagas and Eddic poetry of Snorri Sturluson to the 20th-century masters Gunnar Gunnarsson and Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness, the literary icon who casts the largest shadow upon contemporary authors. Laxness plumbed the history and mythology of Iceland’s past to help claw his fellow countrymen out of Europe’s cruelest poverty, pushing his countrymen into the future while creating a nationalist zeitgeist that helped end centuries of economic subjugation by Norwegian and Danish overlords. That’s a tough act to follow.
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Enter Jón Kalman Stefánsson.
Born at the tail end of the Baby Boom, Jón Kalman Stefánsson did not have to brave the terrors of the North Atlantic for cod or herring, or transit glacial wastelands gathering his sheep before winter claimed them as its own. He is a city kid, university-educated, and a man of our time. Yet, in the tradition of all great writers, he is steeped in the history and nuances of his native land.
A star in Europe, Stefánsson has been nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize four times. It’s not a stretch to imagine he may someday join Laxness as Iceland’s second Nobel winner. While Stefánsson’s novels have been translated into 30 languages, he is still little known on this side of the Atlantic despite excellent reviews in the New York Times, most recently for his 2024 novel, “Your Absence is Darkness.” That may be about to change.
A new edition of Stefánsson’s epochal trilogy, colloquially known as “The Trilogy about the Boy,” published by Biblioasis in a superb translation by Philip Roughton, aims to introduce his masterwork to North America and confirm Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s place as the natural heir to Laxness, Gunnarson and the Icelandic literary tradition.
The first volume of the trilogy, “Heaven and Hell,” picks up where Gunnarsson and Laxness left off, recasting traditional Icelandic protagonists – fishermen, farmers, poets, pastors, stoic housewives and sheep, always sheep – with a contemporary skepticism of nostrums and isms of every ilk. Infused with the lyrical poetry and dryly humorous worldview pioneered by Laxness, Stefánsson’s protagonist – known only as the Boy despite having reached his 19th birthday – joins the pantheon of man-versus-nature tragic heroes who battle the elements and their own doubts, not simply for survival, but to give meaning to their lives.
That Stefánsson rendered his lead character nameless elevates the universality of the Boy’s struggle and ours as well. Set in the early years of the 20th century, the trilogy speaks powerfully to those of us living in an age where the internet going down represents an existential crisis. Stefánsson’s Boy may lack our technology, but he has a superpower, a cathartic fatalism, a belief in his destiny that absolves him of 21st-century neuroses and self-indulgence, freeing him to embrace his fate come what may.
And what could be more Icelandic than a story about a boy and a book?
In “Heaven and Hell,” the Boy finds himself alone in a winter storm, risking death to return his friend’s borrowed copy of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Why is this copy worth dying for? Stefánsson makes the safe return of a book the moral imperative that animates all the Boy’s subsequent actions, giving meaning to his existence, and metaphorically restoring literature to its central role in Icelandic life.
In volume two, “The Sorrow of Angels,” the Boy meets Jens, a postman, and accompanies him on his treacherous journey across ice and snow, blinded by the refracted light of a universe of white that erases all landmarks and boundaries, a world in which every step they take could be their last. The brutality of the elements reduces the Boy and Jens to primal instincts, animalistic self-preservation, only kept human by their memory of poetry and prose. How different the Boy’s world is from my cocooned life of carpeting and climate-controlled leather seats in my EV.
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On those rare occasions I find myself in nature, even a curated “wilderness” like a national park with a gift shop and restrooms, I frequently experience a free-floating anxiety. I even feel this inexplicable anxiety at night in my own backyard when a twig snaps or leaves rustle and I wonder what’s out there? Maybe this is why I am drawn back to Iceland often, every 20 years or so, to remind myself I still live on a planet answerable to the laws of physics more than the laws of man. Iceland is forever Iceland, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Boy reminds us all it’s not things that make us human, rather our place in nature, a place more precarious than we like to admit.
The final chapter of the Boy’s story is told in “The Heart of Man,” where he confronts the ultimate challenge, divining the meaning of love, its risks and rewards, a force more formidable than the wildest of nature’s fury, more beautiful than the most sublime poetry. Set in another time, another place, a world far removed from ours, Stefánsson’s trilogy is an artistic achievement of the highest order, inviting us to walk in the frozen footsteps of another while recognizing our own path through life in each snowy print.