'Every great and original writer,' wrote William Wordsworth, 'must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.' The Icelandic writer Jon Kalman Stefansson, whose style impresses the reader as idiosyncratic at first, then irresistible, certainly meets that mandate in his 2008 novel Heaven and Hell, now published in North America for the first time ... Stefansson’s narrative voice is the book’s most striking quality. It has something in common with the 'slow prose' of Jon Fosse: run-on sentences, rich in repeated motifs, that tap into different layers of thought ... Flexible and supple ... Seductive.
Stefánsson wrote Heaven and Hell so beautifully that portions of it feel like poetic verse ... [Stefánsson has] a concise hand that knows human nature ... Subtle ... While a quiet novel, Heaven and Hellproceeds to a satisfying denouement that never becomes complacent or overwrought.
The novel is lyrical in detailing hardscrabble life along polar sea shores, where everyone has lost someone, yet the fishing boats keep launching ... Aching.
A shimmering lesson about the vitality of human relationships shines through Stefánsson’s grim and inspiring tale ... A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place ... Revelatory ... Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he’s not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations.
