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Feb 09, 2025 By Frank Valish

There is a subdued magic in Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s books. Heaven and Hell, translated from the Icelandic, is a much different book from his last Biblioasis release, the epic tome Your Absence is Darkness. But it demonstrates the same magical prose that has become Stefánsson’s calling card.

Heaven and Hell begins with a group of fisherman beginning to undertake a treacherous winter journey on the Polar Sea. A boy and his best friend, a young man slightly older in age, embark with the larger group, the friend a poetic soul, reading his borrowed copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, the young man, absorbed in his book, has forgotten his weatherproof overcoat and, when the sea becomes violent, snowy, and unrestrained, he perishes in the cold.

The rest of Heaven and Hell is the story of the boy and his subsequent travel across snowy land in order to return the book to the village from which his friend borrowed it. In doing so, the boy contemplates his life, keeping himself from suicide only in order to return his friend’s borrowed copy of Paradise Lost. Upon reaching the village, he finds more lost souls such as himself, people who have led hard lives and who have suffered loss, as he has. This may be of little solace, yet the boy, still uncertain as to the meaning of his own life, grapples alongside curious others with existential truths, why he has been left to live while others are doomed to die.

Despite its short 216 pages, Heaven and Hell and Stefánsson’s writing are imbued with weight, the weight of the sea, the weight of death, the weight of the moon, the weight of life’s consequences. Sections are separated by commentary from an omniscient narrator, but the philosophical comment does little to ease or explain the sorrow or the essence of the book’s existential question. Through the weary boy and his unexplained urge to continue on despite hardship, we are confronted with ourselves. His trial is every person’s. And through Stefánsson’s tale, we find a sad universality, one where we ultimately put one foot in front of the other, not knowing why, what for, or what’s next. (www.biblioasis.com)

Author rating: 8/10