There’s Nothing Provincial About This Three-Volume Icelandic Saga

Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s “Trilogy About the Boy” is set in the remote Westfjords but its ambition is universal.

There are novels that make something inside you come awake, and make you want to keep it awake. Maybe that’s what a classic is: not only a work that endures but one that makes something endure in you—something that lasts even after you may have forgotten the whole story and the characters’ names.

Such is the case with the Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s “Trilogy About the Boy.” The books depict plenty of action—voyages on foot across brutal subarctic terrain, a boy’s tormenting passion for two young women—that seems destined to stick with you for years to come. But there’s something in the reading experience itself that really gets its claws in you and promises to stay, a spiritual charge, daring you to live as though you meant it.

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We are in Iceland sometime in the late nineteenth century. When the first book, “Heaven and Hell,” begins, the father of the trilogy’s eponymous (yet never named) boy has drowned. Faceless authorities break up the impoverished family. The boy’s only sister and his mother are sent to a distant farm. His sister, age three, dies of influenza. Two days later, his mother dies, too. A brother remains, but he is lost to the four winds.

The boy, however, still has a remaining hedge on cosmic loneliness, a friend named Bárður. The two of them work the oars on a “sixereen,” the type of open boat with a sail and six oars from which Icelanders fished, in winter, for cod in the Polar Sea, for centuries. Like a lot of Icelanders, these boys are drunk on poetry, in particular a translation of “Paradise Lost” borrowed from a misanthropic and blind old sea captain, Kolbeinn, in a nearby village. They’re drunk enough that, as the story begins, on the morning of a fishing trip, Bárður is so lost in Milton that he forgets the waterproof clothes, oiled with skate liver, that all the men pack for days at sea. When a sudden Arctic storm overtakes the sixereen, he’s drenched through. Despite the boy’s desperate efforts to save him, he freezes to death before they make it back to shore.

The boy and some of the men haul the frost-hardened corpse into a hut and lay it out on a baiting table. The men then have a little to eat and unceremoniously get to work decapitating, gutting, and salting their catch—after all, as we are told in various ways throughout the trilogy, “Fish is fish, especially if it’s cod”—while the boy cries in the loft overhead.

Life will not exactly get easier for him. He sets out on foot through unrelenting snow to return the Milton to its owner. His friend would not have wanted a borrowed book left unreturned merely because he died in possession of it. The boy, seeing no future beyond this errand, plans, once it’s accomplished, to kill himself. Halfway to his destination, he is forced to bury himself in a hole in the snow for protection from the elements. When he finally arrives and returns the book to the captain, he collapses, unconscious.

Only now does fate offer him a little grace. After hearing what he’s been through, the captain’s de facto landlady and her irascible housekeeper take him in. They decide the sea is not for him. The housekeeper, Helga, informs him that he is to be educated. “A person who holds a pen and paper has the possibility to change the world,” we are told. Which world is to be changed? It may be only the inner world of one person. But does that make it any less of a world?

Icelanders, as a rule, have patronymics rather than surnames. But the patronymics function less as names than as descriptors. First (and sometimes middle) names alone mostly suffice in Iceland, even in print and in formal address. That the singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir goes by only her first name professionally is commonplace to her countrymen, not a piece of arty branding like “Madonna” or “Adele.”

For these and other eccentricities and habits preserved from ancient Scandinavia, Icelandic culture can have, for foreigners, a patina of quirky and irresistible provinciality, a perception that the locals, understandably, find tiresome. (Jon Snow’s adventures north of the Wall in the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” which were filmed largely in Iceland, haven’t helped.) Enough with the trolls. The supernatural does indeed come naturally to Icelandic literature, and to anybody who has spent a night anywhere in the country outside the capital, but the reader coming to this trilogy hoping to meet benevolent, earth-loving witches who keep puffins for pets will be disappointed. The people in these books eat the seabirds, if they’re lucky enough to catch them, and sell their eggs in town with the hope of earning enough to buy a little rye flour to keep their children from dying of starvation over the winter before they die of tuberculosis anyway. Though the setting, in the remote Westfjords, could hardly be more out of the way, even for the majority of Icelanders, there is nothing provincial about any of these books. Their ambition is no less than to tackle total experience, as only a novel can do.

Jón Kalman published “Heaven and Hell” in Icelandic in 2007. The series’ other two volumes, “The Sorrow of Angels” and “The Heart of Man,” came out in 2009. English translations, by the redoubtable Philip Roughton (who also translated five of the Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s novels into English), followed in the U.K. between 2010 and 2013. But his translations of the trilogy have only become available in North America over the past year and a half; the final volume was published in June.

The effect of fiction on a reader’s mind may be numinous, but novels rarely succeed if their material isn’t concrete. Jón Kalman’s sense of physical texture, via Roughton’s translation, is as concrete as can be, vivid and poignant. Consider the tiny gaps in an isolated farmhouse’s stacked rock walls that prove useful for storing the children’s baby teeth, a charm to insure the children’s longevity, even though the walls of the kitchen hold the teeth of one of their sisters who has died there the year before. Or the grass blades moving almost imperceptibly, “like rows of venerable statesmen.” Or the boy running “like a scream.” Or the many arresting sex scenes, as graphic as they are incisive about the characters’ emotions, that vary from the taboo to the treacherous to the grotesque to the transcendent. Take the case of Salvör, a maid—savagely beaten and raped by a husband she burns alive in their house—who is later granted the mercy of another kind of man in the local postal carrier, who, for his part, has made his first appearance in the story frozen to his horse. The two spend the night together, and she later compares their encounter to “going through the horizon.”

For the contemporary English-language reader, a three-volume saga of a young man’s journeys through harsh weather, close friendship, and erotic love calls to mind Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy.” But Jón Kalman’s trilogy is less a hero’s journey and more a deeply psychological stripe of the social novel in the nineteenth-century tradition. The boy is less a hero than a central node, less an Odysseus than a Dorothea Brooke. His effect on those around him is, like hers, incalculably diffused—in his case, amid a village thick with merchants, farmers, drunken scholars, despicable Danes, and stalwart young widows. Among the most memorable of the widows is the landlady Geirþrúður, a name that combines the words for “spear” and “strength” (think “Gertrude”), a coal-eyed former chambermaid who married a man more than thirty years older than she, inherited his house and money, and now feels free to sleep with whomever she wishes, thank you very much, and will contrive a way to preserve her freedom and to care for those she believes need it in whatever way she thinks best.

A motif of this story is that people keep getting assigned, or assigning themselves, to deliver something—a book, a letter, the corpse of a young mother of four. They travel through bleak, unpeopled landscapes while longing for the sweet, sleepy death of hypothermia, only to suddenly arrive, if they don’t die on the way, in some small room (once, after falling down a mountainside and crashing into a house below) with a little fire in it and the tender worry of strangers who share what little they have to eat to keep the traveller alive.

Jón Kalman has a gift for encapsulating the lives of newly introduced characters in hilariously grim asides that dash through not only an individual life but the life of a whole clan. Late in the story, for example, the boy finds himself leaning against the house of a certain Norwegian, Elías, who was

for many years the owner of a whaling station in one of the fjords, but who now lives here in the Village with his Icelandic wife, the daughter of a tenant farmer, thirty years younger and so vivacious that Elías’ hereditary depression—his brother shot himself, his father hung himself, his grandmother swam out and drowned in the sea, their uncle cut his own throat, another ingested poison, his aunt tried to hang herself in the woods but the tree branch broke, as did both her legs, after which she lay helpless for twelve hours, in the cold rain, before being rescued and taken home, where she died of pneumonia—practically vanishes, as long as he sticks close to her.

The humor tends—as in the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas, Iceland’s most famous contributions to world literature—toward understatement. When Friðrik, the village muckety-muck, tries to force marriage on Geirþrúður, lest she bring further discredit on the village with her shameless independence, Kolbeinn suggests that she shoot him. “That would undeniably be invigorating,” she responds.

Even so, there’s nothing glib here. The humor is not a mask but a reprieve, and in fact the narrative seems to be constantly challenging itself to overcome a national habit of always hiding what one feels. At one point, the author observes that “we should probably never write about anything but this: the sorrow, the regret, defencelessness, and what sometimes occurs between two people, invisible but stronger than empires.” The boy’s ardor for two women eviscerates him, and the writing makes you feel it. He isn’t alone in the grip of eros; nearly all the major characters are blessed—or afflicted—with it.

All over the books, there are flights of language that seem to catch the writer and throw him into a new kind of only barely grammatical rightness (“The wind breaks up the sea and everything that isn’t fastened down blows away: handcarts, shovels, promises; forgive me, but I don’t love you anymore, the wind tore my love from me, blew it away”) or into wild yet strangely persuasive set pieces, such as when Bach is played on an organ tied down amid the fish in the hold of a little boat called the Hope, filling the fishermen on board with melancholy and happiness at the same time, and “a longing they don’t understand,” which may partly explain why the skipper, a little while later, pitches himself overboard “like an unfledged bird.”

If there is a shared preoccupation of the otherwise motley crew of personalities here, it’s the cost to be paid for failing to act on life’s challenges. Think of the line commonly attributed, via loose translation, to Søren Kierkegaard, whose work is known to some of Jón Kalman’s more bookish characters: “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose one’s life.”

To many of the characters—particularly the women, like Helga, who “only knows the verb to hesitate by reputation”—daring comes unequivocally, if not easily. To others, like Gísli, the village’s alcoholic schoolmaster, a man who feels he has let life pass him by through his own negligence, it may never come at all. During a lesson, Gísli asks the boy, by way of pedagogical interrogation, what it means to betray oneself. Gísli himself seems to have no clear idea:

The boy closes his eyes as if to make a quick escape: To dare not.

Gísli: What, oh, well, but what, to dare not what?

The boy: Live. To dare not speak. To dare not be afraid. To attempt not to overcome . . . the dark storm inside you. If you do nothing, you betray everyone who matters. If there’s anyone left who matters; alive, I mean. But maybe it doesn’t matter whether people are alive or not, I mean. Nor should you betray those who are dead; we should live for them, as well, they mustn’t be left in the dark and cold, and they mustn’t be forgotten at the bottom of the sea.

Moral philosophy like this can sit awkwardly in the pages of a novel, but earlier in the story the boy has confessed that he doesn’t know why he is, and isn’t entirely sure he’ll be given time to find out. His answer to Gísli’s question, coming as it does two long volumes later, rings true. He’s come by it through hard experience. He has faced death in a hundred forms.

No art form is better situated than the novel to pose questions like the one Gísli asks the boy. Yet few contemporary novels dare, as these books do, to confront the dilemmas of body, mind, soul, and spirit with equal urgency, to bring the reader right to the edge of the absolute, and leave you, after more than nine hundred pages, so elated that you feel the wind under your feet. ♦