A man comes to awareness in a church in rural Iceland, not knowing why he's there or how he arrived. When a local woman offers to reunite him with her sister, he realizes he's lost not only his bearings, but his memory as well: he doesn't recall either sister, nor their mother, the woman buried beneath the stone. As their stories unfold, he's plunged into a history spanning centuries and lives: a city girl drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze; a pastor who writes to dead poets and falls in love with a stranger from afar; a woman who must abandon her son to save her family; a musician plagued by cosmic loneliness; and an alcoholic transfixed by the night sky. Faced with the violence of destiny and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between lives, each discovers the cost of happiness.
Each story could stand on its own; one of the pleasures of the novel is the slow revelation of their connections. This is a tale of heritage, a topic hardly unique to Iceland, and yet it was impossible not to feel that it shares many of the same preoccupations—genealogical and topographical—with classic 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic family sagas ... The structure of Your Absence Is Darkness is best described as a series of recursions: The stories build and break apart, yield to other stories, emerge again later, sometimes at length, sometimes in fragments, flashbacks, single words. The effect is kaleidoscopic; as the narrative turns, pieces shift, stories merge, themes dilate and contract. I fantasized about an edition printed in color, each narrative strand a hue of its own, the shuttling, shuffling syntax fractal in its effect ... In linking remembering to re-creation, he uses amnesia to bring author and reader together as common travelers into the unknown. For what are we upon opening a new book if not amnesiac? We must have our new lives created for us. Either it must be explicitly explained, or we must piece together clues, must eavesdrop. We too appear in the churchyard without memory, and meet the world anew.
Ambitious ... A compelling opening, Stefánsson, like his narrator, seems initially bewildered by where, exactly, to tread ... Stefánsson’s habit of repeating certain phrases also taxed my patience, but by the latter half of the novel, I admit, I couldn’t put it down.
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. The setting is perhaps best understood as a purgatory of the lovelorn, where the persistence of grief and desire holds the characters in a kind of waking trance. 'To be alone and without you, that’s death,' one says in a pointed paraphrase of the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. 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.
