audreyboisard's review
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.25
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
"How is it possible to survive in a country where the redeeming spring kills the vulnerable? Where the dark, long winter lies like a dead weight on people's dispositions and the brilliant summer so often brings disappointment, who survives such things? Durable people, assiduous, sometimes soft with self pity and given to selfishness, but to strong dreams, as well?"
This is the final installment of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's excellent "Heaven and Hell" trilogy - my earlier reviews https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1017257044 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1247296120.
The translator Philip Roughton is to be highly commended - as Gísli, the teacher, tells the boy:
"Translations, Gísli had said, it's hardly possible to describe their importance. They enrich and broaden us, help us to understand the world better, understand ourselves. A nation that translates little, focusing only on it's own thoughts, is constricted, and if it boasts a large population it becomes dangerous to others, as well, because most things are alien to it except for its own thoughts and customs."
The book starts only a few hours after The Sorrow of Angels ends, and as I said in my review of that novel, the three books are best thought of as one large overall work and best read back-to-back, indeed the one issue I had reading this novel was remembering some of the characters introduced in Heaven and Hell, which I read a year earlier.
The focus move away from the treacherous journeys through the snow that dominated, perhaps over-dominated, The Sorrow of Angels: "it is strange to come out into serene, clear air, to step outside without putting yourself in mortal danger, it's almost difficult to keep your balance in such calm."
Spring comes not that it's much of a relief at first: "Spring Is approaching, blessed spring, it comes to us with daylight, small birds, colours, yellow flowers and birdsong, it arrives with a rapid thaw, turning the mass of snow into several days of unbearable slush; the turf farms, some of which are covered in snow, even buried in it, become miserably soggy; beds become wet, it will be cold to sleep, cold to wake, the humidity works its way into one's bones...what was white and soft becomes grey and wet. If the snowfall is the sorrow of angels, sleet is the Devil's spit."
And the novel becomes much more of a character study - both of the unnamed and rather unwordly boy, who continues to fascinate the other, more grounded characters: "I hate the way you look at me sometimes, as if you're incapable of anything, yet as if you know everything, or something about which the rest of us have no clue.", but also of the wider cast. In particular the books focuses on the boy's patron, the fiercly independent Geirþrúður, the eclectic cast of characters she has gathered around her, all looking for some form of escape, and her struggles with the patriarchs of the village.
Literature plays a central role as it has throughout the three books, but here tempered with an understanding of what it can't do: "One touch can say more than all the world's words, that's true, but the touch fades with the years and then we need words again, they're our weapon against time, death, forgetfulness, unhappiness. When man spoke the first word he became the thread that quivers eternally between evil and goodness, Heaven and Hell. Words were what hewed the root between man and nature, they were the serpent and the apple, what lifted us from the beautiful ignorance of beasts into a world that we still don't understand."
Perhaps the most poignant exchange comes when one of the characters connects the boy with the story of Bárður from the first book:
"Didn't your friend die because of a foreign poem?
The boy: No, he died because fish mean more here than life."
This is the final installment of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's excellent "Heaven and Hell" trilogy - my earlier reviews https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1017257044 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1247296120.
The translator Philip Roughton is to be highly commended - as Gísli, the teacher, tells the boy:
"Translations, Gísli had said, it's hardly possible to describe their importance. They enrich and broaden us, help us to understand the world better, understand ourselves. A nation that translates little, focusing only on it's own thoughts, is constricted, and if it boasts a large population it becomes dangerous to others, as well, because most things are alien to it except for its own thoughts and customs."
The book starts only a few hours after The Sorrow of Angels ends, and as I said in my review of that novel, the three books are best thought of as one large overall work and best read back-to-back, indeed the one issue I had reading this novel was remembering some of the characters introduced in Heaven and Hell, which I read a year earlier.
The focus move away from the treacherous journeys through the snow that dominated, perhaps over-dominated, The Sorrow of Angels: "it is strange to come out into serene, clear air, to step outside without putting yourself in mortal danger, it's almost difficult to keep your balance in such calm."
Spring comes not that it's much of a relief at first: "Spring Is approaching, blessed spring, it comes to us with daylight, small birds, colours, yellow flowers and birdsong, it arrives with a rapid thaw, turning the mass of snow into several days of unbearable slush; the turf farms, some of which are covered in snow, even buried in it, become miserably soggy; beds become wet, it will be cold to sleep, cold to wake, the humidity works its way into one's bones...what was white and soft becomes grey and wet. If the snowfall is the sorrow of angels, sleet is the Devil's spit."
And the novel becomes much more of a character study - both of the unnamed and rather unwordly boy, who continues to fascinate the other, more grounded characters: "I hate the way you look at me sometimes, as if you're incapable of anything, yet as if you know everything, or something about which the rest of us have no clue.", but also of the wider cast. In particular the books focuses on the boy's patron, the fiercly independent Geirþrúður, the eclectic cast of characters she has gathered around her, all looking for some form of escape, and her struggles with the patriarchs of the village.
Literature plays a central role as it has throughout the three books, but here tempered with an understanding of what it can't do: "One touch can say more than all the world's words, that's true, but the touch fades with the years and then we need words again, they're our weapon against time, death, forgetfulness, unhappiness. When man spoke the first word he became the thread that quivers eternally between evil and goodness, Heaven and Hell. Words were what hewed the root between man and nature, they were the serpent and the apple, what lifted us from the beautiful ignorance of beasts into a world that we still don't understand."
Perhaps the most poignant exchange comes when one of the characters connects the boy with the story of Bárður from the first book:
"Didn't your friend die because of a foreign poem?
The boy: No, he died because fish mean more here than life."
More...