In a remote fishing village, a boy and his best friend spend the lonely hours on shore reading and talking about poetry. When the friend, absorbed in a borrowed copy of Paradise Lost, forgets his oilskin one morning and the crew is unexpectedly caught at sea in a savage winter storm, tragedy strikes. Overwhelmed by grief--and his crewmates' indifference to what has happened--the boy leaves the village, determined to return the book to its owner. The hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence: he's already resolved to join his friend in death. But when he reaches the town where he intends to end his days, he couldn't have imagined the stories and lives he finds.
'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.
