Your Absence Is Darkness, Jon Kalman Stefansson
Your Absence Is Darkness, Jon Kalman Stefansson
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Your Absence Is Darkness

Author: Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Philip Roughton

Narrator: Ulf Bjorklund

Unabridged: 15 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/20/2024


Synopsis

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists.

A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there, or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer's wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.

Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.

About Jon Kalman Stefansson

Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature and his novel Summer Light, and then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. His books includeHeaven and Hell; The Sorrow of Angels, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; The Heart of Man, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; and Fish Have No Feet, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on March 17, 2024

Prix du livre étranger 2022 English: Your Absence is Darkness Writers are God and the devil in one person - can we forgive them for it? Reminiscent of (and referring to) Laxness' Independent People, Stefánsson's "Your Absence is Darkness" shows a community of farmers in the Westfjords and their ways t......more

Goodreads review by Paul on February 27, 2025

Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada Who you are is completely irrelevant. Where your life went. Your love and betrayal don't matter here. What matters is that you continue with the stories you started. Hopefully, you've realised that you slow down time w......more

Goodreads review by Sini on April 23, 2022

Ik ben zonder meer een fan van de IJslandse maestro Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Ik hou dus van zijn enorm poëtische stijl, van zijn geweldig geformuleerde desillusie, en van zijn niet minder geweldig geformuleerde passie voor het leven. Elk leven is bij Stefánsson getekend door desillusie, verval, de doo......more

Goodreads review by Amaia ✡ on August 10, 2022

Un voyage poétique, à travers des générations sur un siècle et demi, dans les profondeurs de l’âme, dans les abîmes les plus sombres de la vie, mais également sur les landes les plus lumineuses, ayant comme toile de fond un paysage d’une beauté sauvage, qui coupe le souffle - les fjords perdus dans......more

Goodreads review by Dax on April 05, 2025

Loved it. Loved the characters, the relationships, the cultural references, the ambiguity. All of it. The non-linear structure works wonderfully with the themes of memory, relationships and time. There's plenty of sex for all of you pervs out there too. Zero complaints. I think about this book a lot......more