“We laugh, and I truly believe that we genuinely like each other.”: Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz

Jean Echenoz opens his tribute to his longtime editor and publisher, with an account that many other hopeful, and perhaps naïve, would-be authors might know well.  It is 1979, he has just turned thirty-one, and he has finished writing a novel—his first:

I don’t know if it’s my first; I don’t know if I’ll write another. All I know is that I’ve written one, and if I could find a publisher for it, that would be good. If that publisher could be Jérôme Lindon of Éditions de Minuit, it would of course be even better, but let’s not get greedy. Too serious a house, too austere and rigorous, the epitome of literary virtue, too good for me, not even worth trying. I therefore mail the manuscript to several publishers, all of whom send it back.

He continues to send his prospective novel out until he amasses a “near-exhaustive collection of rejection letters” and if for no other reason than to complete the set he takes a copy to the offices of the illustrious Éditions de Minuit, home to writers like Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. He expects nothing, so he is stunned when, on the way to a job interview, he learns that Jéróme Lindon has called his house and wants him to return the call as soon as possible. He phones the publishing house to explain that he has an interview and is invited to come by as soon as he is finished.

That initial meeting ends with a signed contract  and marks the beginning of a productive working relationship, if not exactly a firm friendship, that will continue until Lindon’s death in 2001 (and beyond that, of course, with his successor, his daughter Irène Lindon). The present text, Jéróme Lindon, is a slender volume written shortly after Lindon’s death in which Echenoz reflects on his own growth as an author under the guidance and encouragement—or when he was not impressed a glaring absence of either—of this legendary publisher. It is a warm, funny, and often gently self-deprecating reflection on both a singular man of vision, and a world of book publishing that sadly belongs to another era.

Jéróme Lindon was born into a Jewish family in Paris in 1925. During the war he went into hiding outside the city, and joined the Combat resistance as a teenager. In 1946 he went to work at Éditions de Minuit and two years later with support from his family he took over as director at the age of twenty-three, a position he would hold for over fifty years. If the early post-war years were difficult for the small publishing house, things began to turn around in 1951 when he accepted a novel rejected by other publisher—Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Lindon would go to publish the central figures of the Nouveau Roman, expand Éditions de Minuit’s catalogue to include important French Philosophers and social theorists, and, from the 1970s to the mid- 80s, take on a number of fresh young French writers, of which Echenoz was one. He was, as Echenoz demonstrates in his affection tribute, a man with a keen, and typically immediate sense of what he liked without any reservation about making it equally clear when he felt a manuscript fell short of the mark. During their twenty year association, Echenoz experienced his effusive warmth and enthusiasm when he impressed his publisher, punctuated by lengthy stretches of icy distance when he did not.

Echenoz’s debut novel, in spite of Lindon’s eager embrace, failed to sell, something the novice author hadn’t even taken into account, being thrilled just to know it was out in the world. Then, one day, he receives a call informing him that he has won the Fénéon Prize. Still, the book does not sell, but Echenoz is unphased, reasoning: “I have a publisher and it’s Jérôme Lindon. The rest is unimportant.” And so, a year or two later, he delivers a second novel. It’s a disaster. Lindon is not impressed. In fact, he is at pains to describe in detail exactly what is bad about the book. They will not see each other for two and a half years.

But his next effort, awkwardly delivered, is met with unexpected enthusiasm and they’re back in business again. As time goes on, more books will be published, more prizes will be awarded, and Echenoz will learn to ride the waves of his publisher’s responses to what he writes and, as he becomes a more publicly known and admired writer, his engagements the wider literary world. Lindon has strong views about how his authors should conduct certain aspects of their careers, but as an editor, if he likes a work, he exercises a very light hand. Nonetheless, Echenoz recalls debates over book titles and long, surprisingly fun-filled, sessions spent haggling over commas.

Only 59 pages long, Jéróme Lindon, is a spare meditation on a  special working relationship that is infused with fondness for its subject, amid Echenoz’s humorous confessions of his own, often stumbling, growth as an author—his shyness, his missteps, and his inability to say no. And he shows a genuine appreciation of his  brilliant, if mercurial, publisher’s nature:

 Still, you shouldn’t think that the man is cold, brusque, authoritarian, unemotional, and who knows what else—quite the contrary. In fact, he’s passionate, he can be moved, he laughs, he lights up, he rejoices just as easily as he gets indignant or up in arms. Nor should you conclude that he’s unfriendly, that’s not the issue: he can be utterly pleasant. The issue is that he has other things on his mind than being likeable; likeability is not his concern. And besides, there’s also the fact that he simply has no time to waste, and he can be vigorously up-front about that. One day when I call him about who knows what, first apologizing if I’m disturbing him: Yes, he cuts me off, you are very definitely disturbing me—before hanging up without another word.

Beautifully presented with Echenoz’s own handwritten notes lining the inside of the covers and running across the centre spread, this touching little memorial work is an honest and unvarnished a portrait of an important figure in the world of post-war twentieth century French literature. It strikes just the right note and is guaranteed to make you smile, maybe even laugh out loud.

Jéróme Lindon by Jean Echenoz is translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books.

Voices that must be heard: Under a Pannonian Sky – Ten Women poets from Hungary, edited by Ottilie Mulzet

By the wine-press house, the road turns off
to the right, I see low village roofs

through the mountains, on roads burnished blue,
I’m a stranger here, for I intrude

no one in sight, only acacias, vineyards
sand-built houses beneath antennas

between wine cellars, under the Pannonian sky
a small donkey—grey prophet—walks by

waves back with ears of mother-of-pearl
respectable plebians once lived here

five hundred years ago, the wandering carts
of merchants left their traces in these parts

(from “Under a Pannonian Sky” by Ágnes Gergely, translation Ottilie Mulzet)

The Pannonian or Carpathian Basin is an extensive lowland area located in southeast central Europe that contains most of modern Hungary, and extends into a number of surrounding countries. It carries, in its soil, a rich geological and historical legacy that reaches far back in time. Many different cultures have passed through the region, and the poem above, by Ágnes Gergely, kindles the spirits of those who have, in the past, sheltered under the vast skies, and made the land their home. As such it is the ideal piece to lend its title to this remarkable anthology celebrating ten amazing Hungarian women poets, many who are appearing in English translation for the first time.

Edited by translator Ottilie Mulzet, the poetry collected in Under a Pannonian Sky spans several generations from Ágnes Nemes Nagy, born in 1922 , one of the most widely recognized Hungarian poets, to Anna T. Szabó born in 1972, whose work examines closely the motherhood and the role of women in contemporary Hungarian society. Naturally the turmoil and dramatic upheaval witnessed over the past century—the Second World War, the rise of communism in Hungary, and the disorientation of the early post-1989 years— feature throughout this anthology and all leave their mark, sometimes in deeply personal ways, on the lives of these women.

In her extensive and detailed Introduction, Mulzet sets out the origin and evolution of this project, which took place over a number of years, and offers a general framing of the authors at hand within the context of the restrictions faced by writers in the immediate post- war years, which was then followed by a significant cultural relaxation in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mulzet notes that none of the poets in this volume were forced to make accommodations to censorship and that “it is a tribute to the strength and continuity of Hungarian literary culture that women writing today are still influenced by this seminal cohort of poets.” She then proceeds to consider each woman individually —the anthology is ordered chronologically—considering her background, her formative experiences, and the unique inspirations and qualities of her work. With such a substantial volume, and such a generous selection of poetry from each contributor, one might be well advised to read this introductory section in segments, one poet at a time, so as to best acquaint oneself with each poet’s history, style and tone just before reading her poems. Further, this anthology not only celebrates the work of ten poets, it also involves the dedicated work of six translators—Mulzet herself, of course, plus Anna Bentley, Erika Mihálysca, Clare Pollard, Ivan Sanders, and George Szirtes.

Although each writer comes from a unique background with her own distinct points of reference, the intersection of the personal and the political is clearly reflected in the voices of every poet featured in Under A Pannonian Sky. Between Nemes Nagy at one end of the chronological spectrum and Szabó at the other,  we are invited to spend time with the work of Zsuzsa Beney (1930–2006), Ágnes Gergely (1933– ), Gizella Hervay (1934–82), Magda Székely (1936–2007), Zsuzsa Takács (1938– ), Zsófia Balla (1949– ), Zsuzsa Rakovsky (1950– ), and Krisztina Tóth (1967– ). Their creative years may span some eight decades (while some are yet at the height of their careers), but there are concerns that recur throughout, albeit in differing forms and intensities.

For some, a devastating personal loss—of a parent, spouse, child, or extended family members as a result of deportation, tragedy, or misfortune—directly influences their poetic explorations, but, for women writing through successive periods of major historical and social change, it is not unexpected to find an underlying sense of loss and grief expressed more broadly. Likewise, it not uncommon to find attention to metaphysical questions, meditations on mortality, reflections on identity, and a focus on memory in the poems gathered here. In fact, it is striking in reading this anthology, how these poets tend to be willing to take on big questions of life and death, be it through grand scenes, mythology, dreams and fears, or in the significance of everyday affairs as they confront what it means to be a woman in her many dynamic relationships with others, and a Hungarian citizen in the modern world. Each poet, in her own way, confronts these challenges with a particular strength and resilience.

Now, if an anthology so rich and varied demands an Introduction that looks at each contributor separately, it would be cumbersome for a general review to attempt a passing glance at every poet. Rather, I wanted to be able to express how impressed I am by the power and diversity of the work presented here, and note how intrigued I am by the darkness that so often comes through. Gizella Hervay, for example, had an especially tragic life. She was born in Romania in 1930, and experienced a difficult, impoverished childhood in Budapest during the height of the war and the siege of the city. After the war she moved back to Romania where she studied Hungarian literature and began to write. By the early 1970s, she was becoming recognized for her poetry, but misfortune soon followed when her poet ex-husband died by suicide in 1976 and she lost her fifteen year-old son in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake. She would ultimately take her own life before reaching the age of fifty, but before that she published more than eleven volumes of poetry. Her work tends to be terse and grim, speaking to the traumas she witnessed:

Blood Dries
on the face of the earth

worries
tear up the trees from the root

nights squat
under pimpled sky

in shop windows
smashed in brows

skulls studded
with stones

(“Blood Dries” translated by Erika Mihálycsa)

Sixteen years younger than Hervay, Zsuzsa Rakovszky grew up in Sopron on the Austrian border which was closed until 1989, and where she still lives today. Her father died when she was very young, but she recalls a peaceful childhood and early exposure to literature. Her work draws inspiration from objects and photographs from the socialist years of the 1950s and 60s, and calls attention to the fate of ordinary lives, not only in an era of restraints and restrictions, but in the confusion of the immediate post-1989 years. The imagery of her poetry is often strikingly crisp and vivid, but it carries a heavy sense of history and alienation. The past is a ghostly presence, reflected in the dreams and hallucinations that frequently appear.  In, for example, “In an Alpha State” (translation Otillie Mulzet) surreal visions of heaven, and maybe hell, evoke the mood of the early 1990s, the hopes and fears of citizens as they faced the chaos of disruption and regime change:

‘I saw a city which exists in no land.
Between earth and sky: the meeting place,
lengthwise, of two points. There was neither sun nor moon,
no season ever passed, no time of day.
Into the narrow intervals, yellowish fog loomed,
nothing could be seen beyond the window frames.
Like a giant amoeba’s body, the fog swallowed it all,
began to eat away at the borders of all things:

‘no more difference between the living and the dead,
between dark and light, between good and bad.
I saw a man breastfeeding a snake,
I saw a woman swear allegiance
to a microwave. My own mother became
a fire hydrant. Behind the dense fog
endless battles raged, houses fell to rubble,
the main bus station swept away by floods,
boats sunken in flame-devoured water.
Yet none of this was real in any way.

It would be difficult to pick a favourite among the ten exceptional Hungarian women poets presented in this excellent anthology, but Rakovszky, who is also a well-respected novelist, is one that I would definitely like to come to know better. There were, however, so many poems that simply stopped me in my tracks throughout this volume, as a flurry of page markers erupting from my copy attest. For anyone interested in Hungarian poetry in general, and the responses of Hungarian women writers to the shifting social and political terrain of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in particular, Under a Pannonian Sky is essential reading.

Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women poets from Hungary, is edited by Ottilie Mulzet and published by Seagull Books.

To each time its people: On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen

What is a mother?

A mother is someone who puts plasters on knees and hearts. Your first cradle. Your confessional. Your ally against the world. A warm embrace. Someone who sings away trolls. Someone who possesses neither gender nor looks, but who just is.

That is, until she is no longer what she once was. . . but then who do you become? This is the existential question resting at the heart of Sólrún Michelsen’s novel On the Other Side is March. Set in the rugged, windswept landscape of the Faroe Islands, nestled between mountains and the sea, a woman in her early sixties is navigating the uncertain terrain between being a wife, mother, grandmother, and daughter as her own mother is slowly and steadily slipping away. And, as she seeks to balance the emotional demands of this generational crossroads, she examines what it means to be facing the final and shortest leg of her own life’s journey.

Unfolding in a fragmentary, meditative fashion, the narrative tends to be guided by the strange suspension of time that settles in when one is caring for an aging loved one with dementia. A growing sense of loss, a longing to hold on to what is gradually disintegrating guides logic and emotion. The protagonist is haunted by memories of earlier times when she was a young girl and her mother a beautiful, capable woman. She is nostalgic for a simpler time and  the world of imagination within which a creative young girl could escape the harsh circumstances of Faroese life. In the present day, she finds that childhood magic lingers on in her grandchildren who delight in making snowmen or find an imaginary friend in a sock  stretched over a hand, while at the same time reminding her that growing up somehow reduces our capacity to delight in the wonders in our immediate vicinity.

We grow. And shrink. The distance between head and feet determine whether we see what is right before our eyes. We become half blind. Stop marveling, relishing.

I used to see better. I knew them all. Every single house had its special people with their own particular behavior. Nobody was the same. Not even the ones who always wore black were the same. I knew their names and their appearances, but not only that. I also knew what they were like as people. Whether they had warm or cold eyes. Whether they would give you a penny to run an errand. What their gait was like. Whether to clear off or wait for a slice of cake. Whether they were fond of animals. Whether they told the truth or lied. Every single house in the village had its own household scent.

If the narrator’s world has become more ordered and pragmatic with the demands of adulthood, her mother’s world, once so full of friends and activities, is now on another plane altogether. One that is shrinking to the confines of her house. Increasingly filled with holes. Each visit finds a changed and changing woman. Sometimes disoriented, sometimes absent, and sometimes, for a few precious moments, once again the friend and confidante her daughter longs for. But it never lasts for long, suddenly evaporating into strange comments and irrational demands. As her mother’s health, mental and physical, continues to decline, their roles have shifted completely:

Somehow I feel pushed along. Shunted further and further onto a sidetrack, though I try to muster as much resistance as possible. Try to pretend that everything is the way it used to be. But being mother to my mother makes me feel older. I constantly have to remind myself not to treat her like a child. To show her the dignity she deserves. But she behaves like a child. Comes to me like a child. Obeys me, the way I once obeyed her. 

Although there is a thread of sadness and grief running through this novel, it is so much more. As a meditation on aging, caregiving between generations—a primarily female task to look after both the youngest and the oldest family members—memory, and, above all, the intricacies of loving, it is charged with quiet emotion and dark humour. The narrative moves with a gentle rhythm of its own. The past continually reflects and enhances the present, seasons fall out of order, and fragments of traditional Faroese hymns and ballads are woven in along the way. As well, there are no proper names in the narrator’s account; rather, translator Marita Thomsen has maintained family titles (mama, pápi, omma, langomma) and terms of endearment in the original Faroese without translation. The result is a deeply moving evocation what it means to be alive and what it means to lose a beloved parent. It is also the perfect introduction for Sólrún Michelsen, the highly respected Faroese writer and poet, to an English audience.

On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen is translated from the Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Transit Books.

All kinds of people, all kinds of lives, and all equally lonely: The Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen

Sharp and unsentimental, the prose of Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen crackles across the page, exposing the painful insecurities of ordinary people as they navigate the often messy experiences of life—housewives who question their marriages, children who worry that they don’t belong, families falling apart, and a potential daughter-in-law who suddenly sees the charms of her beloved in a different light after meeting his mother. She excels at capturing domestic discomfort at all its varying levels of tension. The ten stories comprising her 1952 collection The Umbrella, each one short and neatly contained, demonstrate this ability clearly.

Ditlevsen’s stories reflect the time in which they were written, especially with respect to the restricted housebound roles women were often expected to accept once they were married, but her ability to dissect the strained dynamics between spouses, and between parents and children, is timeless, universal. The title story is a pitch-perfect example. Ditlevsen portrays Helga, the protagonist, in a cool, detached tone, as a woman with clear physical and emotional shortcomings—or as she puts it “only averagely equipped”—who had always expected more from life than it could deliver. In her case, she dreamed of owning an umbrella, but that was considered vain and frivolous. Yet, it is difficult not to empathize with her in the stifling conditions imposed on her by the social conventions of her time. Hopelessly attached to her mother and schooled to channel all her energies into keeping house and home for her husband, she is caught in a scheme so rigid and lifeless that it traps both her and Egon, driving him to drinking and her to withdraw. However, her much more proactive mother is concerned by the situation and insists that she sit down with her husband to “talk it out”:

But Helga had never tried to put herself in another person’s shoes; it had never been necessary. Her entire character consisted of a pile of memories without a pattern or plan. There were a number of pairs of brown eyes, a twilight mood, an immense, undefined expectation, a yellow dress, and an umbrella.

When the possibility of finally realizing her dream arises, something explodes in Helga—at least for a moment.

The couples in Ditlevsen’s stories struggle with real or imagined fears and desires, but when there are children involved, it often becomes even more complicated. Painful truths surface when marriages break up, families are torn apart, or new a baby threatens the fragile security of an adopted child. In “A Nice Boy,” seven year-old John was “the nicest boy in the whole area when it came to running errands, chopping wood, washing diapers, and whatever else a person has to do to get ahead in the world.” He was kind and gentle and terrified of doing anything that might cause his parents to regret “taking him in.” Especially now that they had a little boy of their own.

He raced ahead at the thought. He knew he was in debt to humanity because he wasn’t born properly to his mother and father like his little brother, but had ended up with them, by an improbable stroke of luck. He was adopted, and his real parents were horrible people from Copenhagen, who weren’t even married. ‘God forbid you ever meet them,’ his mother had said when she told him that. For a while afterward he would stare at the outsiders who visited his town, imagining they had come from Copenhagen to take him away.

Elsewhere, “One Morning in a Residential Neighbourhood” sees a little girl who is excited to be going on “a trip” with her father, unaware that she is leaving her mother and brother behind for good because her mother has fallen in love with another man. She cannot understand the sorrow and simmering anger of those around her.  In “Evening,” another girl whose parents have already parted, feels torn between her affection for her real mother and her real father, both of whom have remarried, and her uncertainty about how she feels about the new “mommy” and “daddy” who have come into her life. In the opening lines, she is introduced in manner that captures her state instantly:

Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety. She always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was at the moment.

In this, as in the other stories in this collection, Ditlevsen so keenly captures her protagonist’s—and, to be honest, our—deepest desires, griefs, and apprehensions in precise poetic prose that is both clear-eyed and compassionate.

Published as part of the Penguin Archive collection of extracts from larger works, it must be noted that this same collection has also been published together with another of Ditlevsen’s collections as The Trouble with Happiness. Nonetheless, there is something quite irresistible about these red and white pocket-sized volumes that offer an excellent taste of an author’s work. The only shortcoming is the omission of a bio for the author and translator.

Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman and published by Penguin Random House.

In response to a broken world: Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer

The striking title of this far-ranging intellectual and artistic collaboration between Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer comes from Hölderlin’s unconventional translations of the Pindar Fragments:

The lonely school’s capacity for the world. The innocence of pure knowledge as the soul of intelligence. For intelligence is the art of remaining faithful in changing circumstances, and knowledge the art of being sure in one’s understanding in the midst of positive errors. If our understanding has been exercised intensely, it retains its strength even in diffusion; inasmuch as it easily recognizes alien things by its own honed sharpness, and so is not easily confused in uncertain situations.

Although the full passage does not appear until the final section—or Station— of this richly illustrated, interactive volume, the titular statement, that intelligence is the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances, clearly reflects the spirit guiding the discussions, observations, and speculations that shape this work. It is set out on the opening pages in an extract from a conversation between Kluge and Kiefer held on July 5, 2023, at the French Cathedral in Berlin, the day before Kiefer was awarded the German National Prize. It is a concept to be understood as realism. The artist insists that intelligence isn’t a skill:

Like all art, it doesn’t arise in your head, but in your fingertips. Intelligence feels things out, makes attempts, has character, it observes, it’s awake and constant, it takes decisions quickly, yet it knows how to wait patiently.

Like a physician, an architect building a cathedral, a mathematician or physicist. Kluge and Kiefer trade ideas and illustrations back and forth as they seek to interrogate what it means to remain true to oneself in a broken world.

Over the following ten “Stations”—one might describe them as points of intersection of ideas and images—that comprise this volume, Kluge, the writer and filmmaker, and Kiefer, the artist, explore how they and others have endeavoured to exercise their intelligence. Themes and subjects are drawn from Kiefer’s artwork. The inspiration he derives from history, literature, poetry, science, and mysticism is reflected in Kluge’s companion commentaries and experimental short films (accessed via QR codes), and expanded upon in excerpts from the above noted July 2023 discussion between these two important German artists. The result is a dynamic, multi-faceted enterprise.

Kluge and Kiefer each operate in different mediums that combine the ancient, even prehistoric (writing and painting) with the modern (photography and film), and exercise their own distinct understanding of the world with openness, curiosity, and conviction born of experience and experimentation, but their work, in their respective mediums and spaces, meets, as Kluge describes it, tangentially. This is an ideal plane for their collaboration. They discuss, they debate, they agree, they agree to disagree, but throughout it is clear they hold each other in the greatest esteem. Into their collaboration they welcome the contributions and voices of many others, including Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Celan, Joyce, Robert Fludd, and Johannes Kepler. Kluge’s characteristic observations, anecdotal in tone with a tendency to walk a very fine line between the factual and the fantastic, bring in classical mythology, military history, Kabbalistic wisdom, mathematics, and music to provide context and counterpoint for Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures which are reproduced, in detail and in whole (especially meaningful for anyone who has seen Kiefer’s  textured wall-sized paintings in person and knows just how difficult it is to capture the experience in any meaningful way with the camera on your phone).

Each Station has one or more themes, for example, “Tractate on Money, Love, Power and Truth / Four Currencies that Rule Our Lifespans,” “Stories of Exodus,” and  “Finnegan’s Wake and the Construction Site of Words,” just to name a few. There is natural flow and balance between discussion and direct commentary about Kiefer’s displayed artworks and Kluge’s embedded films, and the wide-ranging reflections and observations that surround them and at times veer off in unexpected angles. As Kluge notes:

One of the most surprising effects of great art is its ability to open up new directions. Emblems, perspectives, groundwater of experience emerge, no matter how old, how lost the underlying basis of experience may be. The panel pictures cannot be large enough. They are works of art, but they are also ‘the street signs of experience.’  

If you have not yet encountered one of Alexander Kluge’s books, collaborative or otherwise, especially the latter volumes with integrated multi-media, they can be difficult to contain or adequately describe in a review. There is a sense that they are larger on the inside than one at first suspects. They must be experienced. This particular work, translated by Alexander Booth who has ushered into English a good number of Kluge’s recent publications, is the latest to appear (although Kluge sadly passed away earlier this year at the age of 94, there may be more to come) and the perfectly-matched and well-timed collaboration with Anselm Kiefer makes it especially powerful. And intelligent.

Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

A poet whispers: How complete+ final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net by Ellen Dillon

I have been staring at Barrie Cooke’s pencil sketch for a month,  sucked into the mesh of scribbled lines whirling between two figures in a boat, hauling in a curved fish in a net.

They are a man and a boy to my eyes—an older boy, 17 or so—straining under the weight of the pike.

This may not be the case.

My mind’s eye may have made father and son of them, cleaved in both senses of the contranym by the tangle of pencil lines.

This sketch, Pike Fishing, Self and Ted Hughes (you will want to look it up), becomes a central point of reference for Irish poet Ellen Dillon in her captivating hybrid lyric-essay How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net. She breathes life into it, re-imagining a father-son relationship between the two abstracted figures depicted, and returns to it, addresses it, and holds it as a guiding image as she moves through an exploration of landscape, water, language, poetry, and translation. Barrie Cooke, the English-born Irish impressionist painter, friend of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, was not only a devoted fisherman, but a passionate defender of rivers and waterways. It is no accident, then, that echoes of both Hughes and Sylvia Plath arise in the early pages of her poetic text. But, that is only the beginning.

 Moving between poetry, personal observation and reflection, to an exquisite act of transcreation, the voices of many poets and writers swim through her texts and verses, their words set apart in italics and referenced at the end, but there are three who are essential, who whisper to her from the future and the past: Scottish poet callie gardener whose hybrid debut, naturally it is not offers inspiration and an echoing refrain (“hold your temper loosely, or like a fish”); Irish poet Seán O’Ríordáin whose native language presents the beauty and challenge of translating; and American poet Fanny Howe whose words are invited to converse with O’Ríordáin’s. Throughout this innovative meditation, Dillon remains in tune with the natural world around her—the waterways, the birdsong, the wind—for that is where meaning and understanding lie. They must be listened to, as one can hear in an excerpt from a cento that channels gardener, John Ashbery, and Herman Melville:

Babbling upstream like an echo, fragment utterance

calls you out of the wind, finds you
at last a cave of sound too flimsy for a home
but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing
so invigorating you have learned to overlook
the many discomforts and minor threats to life.
an oily calmness floats out from the east
gathers power, pours through you, floods your cells
with a spacious sense of well-being.

Slowly and smoothly Dillon carries us from her early meditation on two figures in a boat to an Englishman fishing on a lake—that is, to the question of bringing that Englishman into the English language out of his existence in O’Ríordáin’s Irish, in his poem “Oileán agus Oileán Eile,” An Island and Another Island. The echoing island within islands, real or imagined, begins an extended examination that is the beating heart of this enterprise, at least for anyone fascinated by language and by the challenge of translating poetry.

Dillon tells us that she is no translator. “My Irish isn’t good enough, for starters. Words that should shimmer with a wealth of implications remain closed and lumpen in my schoolroom lexicon.” She moves into an exploration of translations, sensitively, feeling her way, guided by O’Ríordáin own poems, her familiarity with his personal geography, and tuned into her muses, including and especially, Fanny Howe. However, her efforts make her conscious of her limitations as she seeks to untangle the mess of charcoal lines that a poem can seem to become on its journey from one language to another. Something essential in the sound-weave of O’Ríordáin’s poetry seems to be escaping her grasp. Is there another route?

Anne Carson writes of translating the same poem over and over again, using the wrong words and it makes me feel I’ve been on the wrong track, one of many wrong tracks, with Seán. I’ve been so affronted by the razzle-dazzle of rockstar poets patching ‘concupiscence’ into his hard-won soundwaves as if he was a home-spun Wallace Stevens, that his poems have grown skeletal, marrowless, in my cold hands.

Perhaps straight translation, destined to lose many of the nuanced textures of the original is not the answer. Maybe a little experimentation is. Enter Fanny Howe. Doubt meets doubt as two writers speak across the years and distance and tongue in a collage of a translation of a section of “Oileán agus Oileán Eile” with lines from Howe’s Gone.

A poet whispers. A poet interrogates what it means to be a poet, to interact deeply with the poems of others, and in the process finds many questions and answers. As it should be.

Dillon’s poetic voice is vibrant, her spirit endlessly curious, and her willingness to engage with nature, art, and the wisdom and words of writers she admires makes for a multi-layered, richly intertextual experience. For a sense of the magic of this lovely lyrical book, you can find an excerpt at Minor Literature[s].

How complete+ final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net by Ellen Dillon is published by Broken Sleep Books.

That strange face in the mirror: Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig

The stamps on the envelope were still moist. I noticed they were foreign. As I got to the window I realized that I was, in fact, in another country, somewhere unfamiliar. I didn’t know where. To confirm or dispel my sense of foreboding, I went into the bathroom. A stranger’s face looked at me from the mirror.

An uncertain, shifting sense of identity haunts Maybe This Time, a collection of nine short stories by Alois Hotschnig originally published in German in 2006,and in Tess Lewis’s English translation in 2011. Eerie and unsettling, his tales often begin and end in a strange, not-quite-alternate reality where it can be difficult to tell if the oddness lies with his characters or narrators, their surroundings, or both. Sometimes things seem a little more grounded, but the angle of observation is unusual, unexpected. At other times, an obsessive anxiety builds until all sense of logic and meaning is distorted. And rarely is the situation explained or resolved. The publisher’s description suggests comparisons to Bernhard (well, they are both Austrian) and Kafka (the standard comparison for themes of alienation), but one might well describe their otherwordliness, mood wise, as akin to classic The Twilight Zone epsiodes. Or perhaps, simply consider it “Hotschnigesque.” (Interestingly, his more recent and more much sophisticated novel My Mother’s Silver Fox, inspired by a true story, still leans into a strong atmosphere of ambiguity and troubling questions of identity.)

The narrators and protagonists of Hotschnig’s stories tend to find themselves in strange situations, drawn into circumstances that defy rational explanation, trapped in distorted dreams, and waking in places they do not recognize. Perhaps even more unnerving, they frequently allow themselves to fall into a cycle that they recognize as destructive. The opening story, “The Same Silence, the Same Noise,” is the account of a man who becomes obsessed with the neighbours of a property he has rented. He observes the couple sitting out on their jetty, day after day, rain or shine, seemingly oblivious to all around them. He keeps trying to convince himself that their indifference means nothing to him, but he simply cannot let it go. Their daily routine, if oddly consistent, may not be as uncanny as the narrator makes it out to be, it is difficult to tell where he is losing perspective. That is, of course, what makes the story so strangely engaging:

My attitude clearly had to change. But I didn’t know how to get away from these two. I simply didn’t exist for them, and that is how they hooked me. They refused contact, yet they willingly exposed themselves to me. I had caught the scent of their lives, which obviously had reached some premature end. I had fed on them, devoured them, and now I wanted more. I couldn’t resist absorbing their most fleeting emotions as my own, and so I carried them inside me and lived out their disquiet, which was also my disquiet.

Later on, in the story from which the title of the collection is derived, “Maybe This Time, Maybe Now,” another narrator seems to be aware that the odd obsession that has cast a spell on his family makes no sense, but again no one is willing to face reality even if the circumstances are, on the surface, far less mysterious. Or are they? Here, an entire family regularly gathers for holidays and special occasions, but one member never joins them. No one knows why he doesn’t show up, he’s not far away and they do sometimes see his wife and family, but he has been conspicuous in his absence for so many years that every gathering becomes solely focused on talking about Walter. Within the subtle absurdity of the situation, is something uncomfortably familiar to anyone with an extended family. . .

Still other stories push the creepiness factor way up. One particularly disturbing example is “Then a Door Swings Open and Swings Shut” wherein a man is lured into an old woman’s home when he is on his way to visit her neighbours. When he enters her house she greets him as if she has long awaited him, and he finds himself in a room filled with dolls of all conditions and ages. Her children. She then introduces him to a special doll, one with his name that he notices bears a striking resemblance to him. She tells him that she had always promised Karl the doll, that he—that is, the other Karl—would come back.

He’s not a bad kid, she said. Peculiar, yes, but you already knew that and, let’s face it, you’re all he’s got. And he’s been waiting ever since you abandoned him. That’s when he came to me. He can’t talk to you about it, at least not yet. But things will work out now you’ve finally come back. And now I’ll leave the two of you alone, she said, and stood up and left the room.

Needless to say, things are about to get really weird for our confused, but oddly enthralled protagonist.

And so it goes. Each of the stories in this slender volume opens a new, unexpected doorway into the life and mind of its characters (one of which is an insect), offering an entertaining little journey into the dream-like world of Alois Hotschnig.

Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig is translated from the German by Tess Lewis and published by Peirene Press.

“I fall awake and think, I want to go home”: Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben

I think, it doesn’t matter where I am, whether calm or with nerves shot to pieces, in the mountains, in towns, sleeping well or sleeping badly, it doesn’t matter, I am quite lost, wherever I am. I want to surrender. I wish to retire. I am tired. I’m not disappointed, but I can’t cast my mind any farther, I’d prefer to draw it in and keep it in a bag. (from “Exile”)

Rosalind Belben is not a writer who is inclined to make it easy for her readers or, rather, she does not entertain characters or narrators who are easily accessed, nor does she shy away from indirect, deliberately obtuse sentences that disregard grammatical niceties. Her protagonists can be blunt and unsparing in their observations, especially of themselves or other people, while at the same time possessing an uncanny eye for the intricacies of the natural world and an uncommon compassion for nonhuman life. But they often seem to become distracted on their way from one thought to another, making  it difficult to follow exactly where they are going, understand where they coming from, and figure out where the lines between memories, dreams, and ordinary experience intersect.

This is especially true with the latest of her books to be given a new lease on life, her 1989 novel, Is Beauty Good. Note the absence of a question mark. For a writer who, with her 1974 novel, The Limit, graphically explored the physical deterioration and decay of the body of a woman dying of cancer, “beauty” may seem an unlikely subject for her to centre. But, even in that work, a beautiful, if unconventional, love affair lay at the heart of the story. In Dreaming of Dead People (1979), her complicated narrator’s often bitter journey to embrace a self-styled spinsterhood, includes a vividly recounted idyllic detour. And, at the end of the day, beauty is a relative quality. Its potential goodness even more so.

For some of the characters who appear in the thirty-one short pieces that comprise this unconventional work of fiction—neither a typical collection of short stories nor a multi-voiced narrative revolving around a sequence of inter-related events—whether beauty is good does arise as a question or consideration, but more often the matter is less obvious, it may lurk around the edges or be conspicuous in its absence. The protagonist of the first entry, “The Nightmare” addresses the question most explicitly. Fritz is a guard at the Berlin Wall who wonders, in conversation with a friend, “what use is a sense of beauty, if it brings also a sense of ugliness and repulsion and distress when we’re faced with things which offend it?” Do we overlook the beauty inherent in that which repulses us? If that which is ugly or painful serves a warning, can beauty thought to be morally good? The ugliness of the environment he lives and works in exhausts him; would it not be better to be unburdened, free of notions of beauty, like the dreaming horse?

Each of the chapters opens cleanly, without introduction, and ends on a poetic note of some sort. Settings range from Berlin, to English gardens, to alpine landscapes, and most of the accounts that unfold are self-contained, if often fragmentary in nature, though a few will later resurface to be seen from another angle. Narrative form is varied as Belben employs both direct and indirect monologue to pull her characters’ thoughts and voices to the surface. Some passages unfold in a single, flowing sentence or unbroken paragraph, while others tend to the conversational, or feature choppy, short phrases as memories and observations tumble out atop one another. German words and expressions arise from time to time, without translation. And, in the third section of the book—“The Great White Worm: from the deaf man’s conversation book”—grammatical structure starts to break down altogether, with the increasing appearance of random capitalization and the frequent contraction of words to just few letters. The shifting style and form can require some concentration to follow the intended meaning, but it makes for a more dynamic and immersive reading experience.

If there is a quality that seems to unite the many characters we meet, the many minds we pass through in this polyphonic, multifaceted novel, it is one of longing tinged with melancholy. As if beauty, intangible and elusive, is an emotion. One that defies any concept of universality. Belben’s protagonists often seek some kind of release in nature, looking for solitude, escape or, like the three year-old hero of “The Insatiable Wheel” furiously peddling, alone on his tricycle, day after day, a mountain that will ever remain out of reach. There’s Olive in “Shooting the Bolt,” who can’t abide other women, who finds their understanding of what it means to be a woman somehow alien and distasteful. She forges her own natural company among berries and currants, tending them with care and ushering them toward their natural destinies in jams and puddings.

Olive is attached to the fruit cage, she spends hours on her hands and knees, weeding, or wading up to her armpits in the raspberry canes, rasp berries remind her of horses’ lips, soft fruit, apparently, is fierce and brave and stands up, she had only to wriggle her fingers through the wire of the old door, to reach the bolt, one isn’t truly locked in the fruit cage, but how, she thought, do I get out of being a woman, it is repugnant, she lay down in the last of the dew, the currants slowly subsided in the colander.

Elsewhere, there’s an outing with a ghostly Hölderlin, and several encounters with horse-angels. And dogs. Dogs appear frequently in the waking and dreaming lives of  more than a few protagonists, and feature in their ethical and aesthetic reflections. “Florus” is a love letter to a beloved pet, now gone; the aging narrator of “Pfaueninsel” tells of caring for an equally aged boxer when its owners are away; and the ornery bedridden character gathering her thoughts in “The Shy Elt” reports regular dreams about dogs that she struggles to make sense of:

I drm! every knight.       of dogs, puppies. Of doing sthing wrong with thm, I carry armfls of pups swhere & I have WORRY over thm. I have to carry armfls back, I wake before I cn, I’m not so clevr cn you explain tht, it wld be nice to have an inklg bec. I drm it too reg. for comfort, we’ve nevr had dgs. 0 to do with thm. Pups. I’d be happ. to drm of cats. And 3 nights ex 5 I have thm myself! Or I guess thats how they must be born, they have no othr mothr you see, it embarrsss me, in the drm. Your not squeamish are you

Is Beauty Good with its brief, mostly unrelated chapters, few extending beyond four or five pages, highlights Belben’s propensity to inhabit the more uninhibited thoughts of ordinary people without the runway a longer work of fiction affords. It can feel exhilarating and unnerving to move from one scenario or account to the next. One is encouraged to listen closely, invited to reread. For the strangeness. For the familiarity. For the poetry. In her Introduction, Esther Kinsky describes the appeal perfectly:

The voices and visions play tricks and offer surprises, and there’s a sense of humour even when tragedy is lurking in the wings. But they also expose fundamental problems of communication, the vulnerability and inconsistency of our common currency of language, its helplessness. Belben’s writing catches something at the root of human existence, a state between dream and reason where all sense of belonging is suspended, making way for longing to define the self. It is also a state between words, concerned with the tiny stillnesses, the white spaces harbouring endless possibilities without which language couldn’t exist.

It is, perhaps, within these tiny stillnesses that notions like “beauty” and “goodness” can be hinted at, even if explication remains just out of reach, just on the tip of the tongue, or as is too often the case, in the emptiness left when only their opposites remain.

Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben with an Introduction by Esther Kinsky is published by New York Review Books Classics in North America (August 2026) and by And Other Stories in the UK (July 2026).

A walk on the wild side: The Pure and the Impure by Colette

Colette’s The Pure and the Impure opens in an opium den in Paris sometime during what would come to be known, looking back through the veils of nostalgia, as the Belle Époque. Our narrator, also named Colette, arrives, not as a participant but as a writer intent on conducting a little research. Perhaps, it is implied, for novel.

Fully prepared to be bored, I settled down on my own little mattress, lamenting the fact that the squandered opium smoke rose thickly to the skylights. There it reluctantly came to rest, and its dark, appetizing fragrance of fresh truffles and burnt cocoa gave me patience, a vague hunger, optimism. The muted red color of the veiled lights pleased me, as did the white, almond-shaped flames of the opium lamps, one close by, the other two disappearing like will-o’-the-wisps, far off, in a sort of alcove tucked under the balustraded gallery.

She describes the night as it passes, with a careful attention to the sights, sounds and scents, but all the while she holds herself apart from those indulging directly in the smoke. Her words carry the promise that all manner of decadent secrets may be revealed in the pages to come and, as the narrative progresses, she does go on to discuss sexuality, gender, and the dynamics at play between men and women, speaking through her alter ego with a frankness that is fresh and at times startling. But, as in the opium den, an element of her own experience is always held apart, even contradicted by the attitudes she later expresses. And that complicated dance that both reveals and conceals is one of the reasons that this novel-that-is-not-quite-a-novel is so very engaging, as Rachel Careau’s carefully referenced and sensitively rendered retranslation demonstrates so clearly.

Originally published in French as Ces plaisirs in 1932, and then, after considerable revision, in 1941 under the author’s preferred title, Le pur et I’impur, Colette’s unconventional text was met with mixed responses. Its subject matter was salacious, no doubt upsetting some, but its structure—a series of portraits of people she has known, or known of, sometimes identified directly and sometimes referred to by pseudonyms or initials—lacked the typical narrative flow of a novel. Was it a memoir? Or a collection of gossipy accounts of past friends and lovers? Opinions diverge. However, for Colette herself, and for many of her readers, it may be her finest literary achievement. By turns oblique and unguarded in its revelations, it perhaps comes closer to an autobiography than the memoirs she would write, but it reads as something slightly different. Autofiction disguised as commentary? Whatever you call it, The Pure and the Impure pulls back the curtains on an unspoken world of sexual adventure as it existed more than a century ago. Colette introduces us to several self-styled, yet bitter, Don Juans, speaks of the companionship she found among a group of gay men, examines the nature of lesbian desire, and explores transmasculine cross gender expression in a manner that feels strikingly contemporary today.

Bisexual herself, Colette had many lovers, both male and female, during and between the first two of her three marriages, and was surrounded by a number of extravagant lesbian and gay personalities. She also appears in photographs wearing men’s clothing and confesses to having, at least in her younger years, an internal masculinity, a “mental hermaphroditism” that she wished she could escape. She speaks about how tipping the balance between a woman’s public sex and her concealed sex makes her so masculine that she unnerves a man. Such a woman’s domain, then, is that of other women:

How timorous I was, how womanly beneath my shorn hair, when I was pretending to be boy! . . . “Who will consider us women? Well, women.” They were the only ones who weren’t taken in. Under the cover of such insignia as a pleated shirtfront, a stiff collar, sometimes a vest, always a silk pocket square, I frequented a vanishing world, on the margins of all worlds. If mores, bad and good, haven’t changed in twenty-five or thirty years, class consciousness, by its suppression, has gradually undermined the demoralized sect I am speaking of, which tried, trembling with fear, to exist beyond the reach of hypocrisy, its breathable air.

In this short passage, Colette moves from describing her ability to pass within this community of women who enjoy masculine attire and activities, to what turns into a rather sad portrait of an individual she calls “La Chevalière.” She describes her as a woman with “the strange appearance of a handsome man” who so deftly and stubbornly straddles the gender line that she is unable to form lasting relationships with women and ultimately fits in nowhere. Colette based this character on a well-known real woman, Mathilde de Morny, a former lover of hers, but it is apparent here and later in the novel, that she questions if two women can ever truly be very happy in a loving intimate relationship if “one of the women shifts toward being what I call a pretend man.” Thus, if “La Chevalière” can be seen as an early depiction of what we now refer to as a transgender man (and as a trans man myself, I would accept that perspective), it is not an entirely positive one. Clearly Colette is still nursing some baggage from her five year relationship with the inspiration for her character who, to no surprise, did not receive the depiction well. Such is the contradictory tendency that runs through this book.

For a writer who tackles sexuality in an open and seemingly unapologetic manner, the attitudes Colette expresses towards lesbians, and feminist ideas, is not as progressive as one might expect. In The Pure and the Impure, she looks back to the turn of the nineteenth century to find her ideal image of love between two women. Her portrait of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who escaped the expectations of their aristocratic upbringings and retreated to the Welsh countryside where they lived together as a couple for fifty-one years is detailed. Colette carefully pores through the journals of Miss Butler, the older of the two women (unaware that Sarah also left writings), delighting in the bucolic pleasures of their days, and zeroing in on indications of their physical intimacy, such as the mention of “our bedside”:

English readers, more severe and more depraved than I, may consider this proof, but proof of what? Envious of so unshakable an affection, they assume that these two loyal maiden failed to remain pure—but what do they mean by pure? I have a bone to pick with those who believe that people aren’t being indecent when they stroke a young cheek, as warm and fresh as a velvet-skinned peach; but I their palm cups, squeezes, and weighs the pink breast as it would the peach, like it umbilicate, we must blush, cry out in alarm, sully the assailant . . . How hard virtuous people find it to believe in innocence!

Of course, as one reads this chapter, with its extensive quotes from Miss Butler’s diary, and Colette’s admitted obsession with certain passages filled with tender expressions of love and affection, it is easy to question whether her nostalgia for a time of a simpler, less flamboyant expression of love—lasting love—between two women says more about her own conflicted notion of purity than anything.

That is, perhaps, the real question at the heart of The Pure and the Impure. As a novel, it unfolds as a series of reflections that Colette is directing at her audience—that is, her reader. There is a conversational tone to her prose, the frequent use of ellipses creating a sense that she is almost feeling her way through her narrative, as, in manner, she is. There is a sensuous physicality to her writing. As Careau says in her Translator’s Note:

[. . .] Colette’s work, rarely cerebral, constantly foregrounds the body, whose intelligence she recognizes through her own experience: “It is my body that thinks,” she writes in La retraite sentimentale. “It’s more intelligent than my brain. It feels more subtly, more completely than my brain. When my body thinks . . . everything else falls silent.”

Yet her language is, in fact, controlled and precise, even—perhaps especially—when she is being pointed in her observations and recollections. She tends toward a certain economy of words, but her images can be very intense and she delights in rare and scientific words. And, of course, because most of her work has autobiographical underpinnings, it is always tempting to seek  the true Colette out in her novels and stories.

With this new edition of The Pure and The Impure we have a welcome  opportunity to experience (or re-experience) Colette’s fascinating meditation on the nature of men and women, sex and sexuality, through Careau’s attentive and sensitive translation, supplemented by extensive and detailed, yet unobtrusive, endnotes. Drawing on her own experience as a dancer, Careau describes how the musicality and discipline of ballet helped prepare her for a writer like Colette, even if she might not have realized it when she first encountered her work (her translation of Cheri and The End of Cheri was published in 2022). In her Note, she makes a very powerful statement about the role of discipline in translation:

Translation demands the dual discipline of close reading and careful writing: an attentiveness to the nuances of meaning of individual words (and to the nuances of their meaning for a particular author), to the repetition of words across a text, and to the order of words and phrases and how it causes meaning to unfold in a sentence; an alertness to tone, and its slightest shifts; a sensitivity to the sound, the music of the language. Translating Colette also requires the discipline of a researcher, in order to track down the rare words that she delights in: classical and literary usages, technical and scientific terms, contemporary slang and argot, obscure regionalisms, neologisms.

Her discipline is well rewarded in bringing all the unique qualities of Colette’s prose into focus. This is an endlessly intriguing work containing complex layers of fact, fiction, and even a little fancy. But, to read The Pure and the Impure today, from the perspective of present (and increasingly politically volatile) attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, we can appreciate how groundbreaking the book was—and how the kinds of contradictions Colette ultimately expresses about sexuality, her own and that of others, still complicate our attitudes today. Plus ça change. . .

The Pure and the Impure by Colette is translated from the French by Rachel Careau and published by W.W. Norton.

“Is your heart still beating? If so, how?” – The Heart of Man by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

There are very few things that man needs: to love, to be happy, to eat; and then he dies. Yet there are over six thousand languages spoken in the world — why do there need to be so many in order to make such simple desires understood? And why do we manage it so rarely, why does the light in words fade as soon as we write them down? One touch can say more than all the world’s words, that’s true, but the touch fades with the years and then we need words again, they’re our weapons against time, death, forgetfulness, unhappiness.

It has been a long, cold winter marked by hardship and loss, and now that the snow has finally melted and a reluctant spring settles in, it is the season when, as they say, a young man’s fancy turns to love. But in The Heart of Man, the third and final installment of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Trilogy About the Boy, his unnamed protagonist is not alone in his longings and desires. Romance, be it passionate or practical, is in the air, infecting more than a few lonesome souls and leading to some unlikely couplings amid tragedy, conflict, and confusion.

In each of the first two volumes, Heaven and Hell and The Sorrow of Angels, the most intense drama lies in the battle against the unforgiving elements of ice and snow during a winter that has held fast to a corner of Iceland well in to May. In the first novel, after witnessing the death of his only friend aboard a fishing boat, the sensitive nineteen year-old referred to simply as “the boy” makes his way to the Village to return a borrowed copy of Paradise Lost and finds himself taken into the home of Geirþrúður, a scandalously independent woman, and her companions Helga and the old, blind sea captain, Kolbeinn. Here he becomes part of a makeshift family, one where books and literature are appreciated. The second part follows the boy and the postman Jens as they cross a sparsely populated stretch of land to deliver mail to a community on the north shore. As storms rage, their struggle with the forces of nature hits a fever pitch, concluding with a terrifying accident.

When The Heart of Man opens, the boy is slowly regaining conscious awareness in a strange room. Jens is sleeping in the next bed. It seems that they had the good fortune to crash into the side of the doctor’s house when they lost control on their icy descent to the village of Sléttueyri, the intended destination of their trek across the frozen Icelandic landscape with a heavy mail bag and a most unusual parcel they picked up along the way. If he is surprised to have survived, the boy is even more surprised by Álfheiður who appears at his bedside with her short red hair and deep green eyes. He is smitten. But also confused, because back home he believed he had already lost his heart to Ragnheiður, the privileged daughter of an important local merchant and broker, even if she may never see him as a serious prospect. When he returns to the Village, she continues to tease and seduce him against her father’s explicit warnings, but the red-haired young woman on the northern shore still haunts the boy’s dreams. And then he receives a letter that asks: “Is your heart still beating? If so how?”

It’s beating like that of a drowning man, a wingless bird, how the hell should he answer this? Of course it’s important to receive a letter, to have a person consider it worthwhile to sit down and assemble words and have you in mind the entire time it takes to write the letter, to receive a letter indicates that you exist, that you’re closer to being light than darkness. Admittedly, not all letters are good, and some should perhaps never have been sent, never have been opened, read, some are full of hatred, accusations, they’re poison that will deprive you of your strength, they bring darkness and disappointment.

In this third volume of the trilogy, the terrain to be navigated is that of the human heart, and the boy is not the only one on such a journey. As a result the world of the Village expands and deepens as we come to know the townsfolk better. We witness the troubled power dynamics that exist between social classes, and between the sexes. One might also suggest that divisions between misfits and the accepted members of society are exposed, but to be fair, the environment and challenging living conditions of this part of the world attract and reward those who have their own distinct idiosyncrasies. There are many such characters here, each one with his or her dreams and disappointments, joys and despair. Yet, even with its multiple crisscrossing storylines, the tale never drags over its 400 pages thanks to the rhythmic force of the chorus of drowned ghosts at the helm. These timeless storytellers, fueled by longing, tend toward the melodramatic, lending an operatic quality to the narrative, but in turn allow the characters’ thoughts and actions to unfold with a degree of distance. They are relaying an account from the past, but action unfolds in the present. Dialogue is relatively succinct, woven into longer paragraphs or set aside in a scripted format, while repeated refrains reinforce the flow.

Stefánsson writes with the soul of an Icelandic epic poet, his grand romantic spirit and poetic prose is rooted in the sagas of the past but directed at a contemporary audience. His ghostly narrators, in telling the boy’s story, are reaching through a wound in existence to grasp at what they miss the most:

Yet no story can ever be told completely, or, how shall we say it; we inhale in the nineteenth century and exhale in the twenty-first. Time is an illusion; the only useable unit of measurement is life. People never change, regardless of the passage of time, what we call the years; fashions change, not mankind. But what pains us most is that we no longer exist, except in these words; they’re as close to life as we can come.

To read this tale, then, is to surrender to the music of the language, because the real question at its heart is: what is the worth of poetry and knowledge? The boy, orphaned after the death of his parents, has known years of hard labour on farms and fishing boats, but it did not come naturally. He was clumsy and prone to daydreaming. So, although his strength and endurance have been recently tested in his journey overland with the postman, it is the fact that he has been welcomed into a home filled with books and given a chance to learn, that truly gives him a sense of value. But will that be sufficient to resolve his internal conflicts and secure his future happiness? Is that even possible for anyone?

The Trilogy About the Boy does come to a dramatic conclusion at the end of The Heart of Man, but it is one that is not without ambiguity. Of all of the volumes in this trilogy, this is perhaps the one that reads best as a standalone work, but again, the pieces that fall together will have a stronger impact if the earlier books are read first. And, on what is turning out to be a very hot summer across the Northern Hemisphere, it might be just the right time to escape to a colder climate for a while.

The Heart of Man by Jón Kalman Stefánsson is translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton and published by Biblioasis.