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
