On meets him at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, next to the Parisian publishing house (Grasset) which publishes Jon Kalman Stefansson’s new novel, Your absence is only darkness, price Point-France Inter 2022. The Icelandic writer, born in 1963, begins a media marathon, as if all the clocks were on time with this book, in the continuity of such powerful precedents (to name a few)Asta, 2018), and even more surprising. It is a tsunami of emotions, a reading that consoles all the sorrows so much it is happiness to live the pain as the joy under his pen.
Hotel ? This is exactly where Soley, one of the many women in the book, now works, in this lost fjord in western Iceland, where the narrator with amnesia finds himself. “The only thing I’m aware of is that I miss people sorely. By writing – under the gaze of an angel or a devil? -, he tries to reconstruct little by little the puzzle of his relations with all these living and these dead, too, who will end up in a big “celebration of existence” at the hotel. In the meantime, their destinies intersect in a book going up then down and climbing again in the genealogical trees of the families in a temporal arc that goes from the XIXe century to 2020, the year of its release in Iceland.
It was translated into French by Éric Boury, a formidable ferryman of Icelandic literature, who still remembers his reading ofBetween heaven and earth (2010), his first translation of Stefansson. In this language as fascinating as the island where he comes from, the writer arriving from Reykjavik answers a few questions out of the thousand that we would like to ask him. We suppose that, like his character, he writes his first draft with a pencil: which he confirms. “And when it’s too small and I can’t trim it anymore, I put it in my glasses case,” he said, pulling it out in front of our eyes, and use it as a bookmark. »Entry into« subject »!
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Point : At the beginning of your book there is a mysterious duo: a driver-pastor and an amnesic narrator. The first pushes the second to write his stories on sheets that he puts in front of him. What is the pact that binds them?
Jon Kalman Stefansson : This sanctified driver, we do not know if he is simply a driver, a pastor, he can be anything: a form of god, of a demon, or the manifestation of something that we do not understand. In this novel, I consciously and unconsciously play on the nature of his identity, because there are things that we do not fully understand and that we will never fully understand in life. For me, it is very important and quite liberating not to fully understand things. It’s tempting and even fun to leave uncertainties, gray areas in the reader’s mind, because what I want most is to turn my readers into poets and writers.
The way in which the narrator tells the stories indeed gives the reader the feeling of having a power over these sheets blackened with pencil …
Yes, we see the book being made, we can almost say that the reader finds himself with this amnesic narrator literally “on his hands”. The reader travels with him through this web of stories, and in the same way that the narrator does not know where he came from, who he is, etc., the reader is in the same position when he discovers a story, also not knowing where it came from. And that goes for me too, because often I don’t even have a clue where these stories come from… And it’s wonderful, because I feel like I manage to write something much more. vast than my little person. As soon as I started to write, the first time, almost by chance, I thought it was great, because all of a sudden, while writing, I felt like I knew a lot of things. And then when I put down my pencil, I realized that I was just as ignorant as before. That’s the wonderful thing about writing, and about any artist. What he creates is much bigger than him. This is why, moreover, often, when you meet the artists that you admire a lot, you are a little disappointed (laughter).
The time frame of this family chronicle goes from the XIXe today, or almost. While in France is setting up the Dreyfus affair and Zola is threatened, you bring in the character of Gudridur, a farmer who will prove to be remarkably erudite: where does she come from?
Ah, I had forgotten Dreyfus! (to smile) I do not know from what abyss she came out. I didn’t plan this Gudridur story, but as soon as this character came to me, I understood that there was something important. Maybe also, because I have always been very interested in the position of women in the history of the world, stunned to see how few rights women have, and to see that a crowd of people were convinced that the man was superior to the woman. It’s so ingrained in our customs, in our languages, that we are still struggling to free ourselves from these conceptions, and I feel like I am constantly writing to disagree with this. thought. Gudridur is one of those anonymous women who had intelligence and a passion for study, beauty too, but who seemed to be confined to the roles of mother and wife. She lives in a time when things are starting to change very slightly and is doing all she can to take advantage of it. In these passages, I also thought of all these people who would no doubt today be intellectuals, university teachers and who, at the time, had no chance of being able to study. In Iceland, men had a tiny option to do this, but women none.
What does the word “darkness” cover in Icelandic, and for you?
For me, it’s a cave, a cave, in which you have to crawl and let yourself be enveloped by the darkness. One of the most beautiful things that I know is to see darkness gradually plaster against a wall, to see night coming. My favorite seasons are fall and winter, the time when the daylight fades, when it gets very dark, in December. And at the same time, there is not much that is more beautiful than to see my country and my city tear itself away little by little from the night, one has the impression to see Iceland reborn. We are surrounded, enveloped by infinite moments of light, you just have to have your eyes open to see them. The word “darkness” is polysemous, it may be the most beautiful thing as I have described it, which brings us the stars, preserves secrets, covers everything, stimulates the imagination, but there is also this difficult darkness, and even frightful ones that we harbor within us. And there it is bottomless darkness.
“Why don’t we write a little more about joy since there are so many happy people in the world? Asks the narrator. Yes why ?
When we write about misfortune or the struggles that pull the world apart, the source is inexhaustible, and we must try to regulate them through writing, poetry; joy is meant to be lived, not written. Even if the joy and happiness are magnificent, on 600 pages of joy, one must be bored! The ideal is that a book contains a mixture of the two in fact.
One should not leave home in the morning without having read at least one poem in order to prepare for the world.
Do you talk to dead poets, like the pastor’s character Pétur does, when writing to Hölderlin?
I haven’t gotten to writing them letters, but I should … (to smile) That said, if we admire a deceased poet, if his poems are part of our life, this poet runs through our veins, and therefore we are in constant conversation with him or her, if I take the example of Sappho: we can read it and fall in love with it, and completely forget that there are over 2,000 years between us. For me, it is through the poem that we go the furthest. One should not have left his bed, left his home in the morning, without having read at least one poem, in order to prepare for the world.
How do you say “love”, your main subject, in Icelandic and what place does it occupy in national literature?
I believe Icelandic is the only language in the world or the word ‘love’, ‘ ast “Rhymes with the word” brast Which means disappointment, betrayal, and also what does not last! It’s fascinating … To talk about the Icelandic tradition, we can’t say that love is the main theme (to smile), because the entire Icelandic literature draws its sources from the sagas where, of course, there is love everywhere, but it always remains below the surface, it looks like underground movements under the earth’s crust, without ever that we see it directly. When I was a child, we never said “I love you”. We never heard that, we were too closed to say such things, we needed at least a bottle of vodka to get there!
But, then, how did you “allow” yourself to write on this theme?
I come from a generation nurtured by American films which often end in a kiss, and by pop music texts whose importance has become preponderant in all strata of society. The songs that have had the most success are about love, either the moment of enamoration, or the happiness it ensures until the end of his days. But from childhood, I noticed that people who formed couples were not necessarily lovers, or if there had been love, it had evaporated. So this phenomenon of love, with this desire for eternal love and the difficulty of those who want to cling to it with all their strength, seemed to me from the start an interesting theme. Love does not care whether the person it is going to set its sights on is married or not, so it has always brought a lot of happiness and unhappiness.Illiad, like most of the great ancient epic texts, speaks of this. For 4000 years, we have written a host of versions of “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” or “PS I love you” …
Do you believe that one is genetically depository of the emotions as the beginning of the novel suggests, and the character of Eirikur too, in particular?
It may not be the happiness or the unhappiness that we inherit, but rather a set of characteristics that make some people have more of the blues than others. Obviously, the founding act for Eirikur is this fear that his mother did not want him, this phenomenal feeling of rejection. He is confronted with the total absence of his mother and the alcoholism of his father which makes him unable to hug him. That’s why he’s cracked, like the wall of a house, which is very sad for him and very good for me as a writer, because it generates a lot of things around this character. But I hope that after the end of the book will open for him a much more radiant period, since the woman of Marseille will find her at this party. And we don’t know what’s going to happen …
They say that each person has a story, basically only one. Does yours seem to revolve around abandonment?
Yes, in a way, probably. Since I lost my mother when I was six, this is a foundational event, which inevitably reflects on everything that happens afterwards.
Writing elsewhere than in Iceland and on something other than Iceland, is it possible for you, whose work says so deeply about your island?
This is my 13e novel. And I never really wrote the book I planned to write initially, it fills me with gratitude that I didn’t, because all of my novels start from the moment I start writing them. I can’t say anything about it before, the decision-making power of the theme, of the subject, is taken away from me as soon as I start, so I can’t say that I will be able to write about such and such a thing. But on the other hand write anywhere, yes, I think. Besides, the last 200 pages of my novel Asta, I wrote them in Paris. And as for Iceland, it’s so deeply ingrained in me that no matter what the book is, it is bound to appear, always.
Your absence is only darkness, by Jon Kalman Stefansson, translated from Icelandic by Eric Boury, ed. Grasset, 606 pages, 25 €