Biographical note:
Icelandic author, born in Reykjavík in 1963. Summer Behind the Slope, and Of Tall Trees and Time were nominated for the Nordic Council's Literary Prize. In Summer Light, Enter Night is set in a small village in the west of Iceland where one inhabitant after another wanders bewildered among the labyrinthine paths of the human heart. Jon Kalman Stefansson was awarded the 2005 Icelandic Literature Prize for this novel. In 2011 he awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Award. Over the last years Jon Kalman Stefansson has been working on the trilogy consisting of Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels, The Heart of Man. The third and final book in the trilogy won the Icelandic Bookseller's Prize 2011 and was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize. Stefansson has most recently won the Italian Grinzane Bottari Lattes Prize for The Sorrow of Angles--the second installment in the trilogy Heaven and Hell.
Main description:
Jon Kalman Stefansson is the winner of the Icelandic Prize for Literature and has been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature. Heaven and Hell, is a perfectly formed, vivid and timeless story, lyrical in style, and as intense a reading experience as the forces of the Icelandic landscape themselves. Der Spiegel said it was "like an oyster--a glinting treasure in a rough shell."
In a remote part of Iceland, a boy and his friend Barour join a boat to fish for cod. A winter storm surprises them out at sea and Barour, absorbed in "Paradise Lost", succumbs to the ferocious cold and dies. Distraught from the murky circumstances of Barour's death, the boy leaves the village, intending to return the book to its original owner. The extreme hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence to him--he has already resolved to join his friend in death. But once in the town he immerses himself in the stories and lives of its inhabitants, and decides that he cannot be with his friend just yet.
