“The Pain of the Angels” of Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Jón Kalman Stefansson’s novel “The pain of Angels” is for “Heaven and Hell”, the second part of his trilogy. “The pain of Angels” was released at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2011, the guest of honor at the small island of Iceland was.

Stefansson’s protagonist is “the boy”, the only unnamed figure. Handlungsort the sparsely populated northwestern Iceland, with its fjords and massive glaciers Drangajökull. It’s April, the end of the 19th century, the winter this area has yet under control.

Now, “the boy” for days on the road, he can hand barely see before our eyes, blowing snow and a violent storm make progress almost impossible. He accompanies Jens, the postman, whose duty it is to get the mail to the remote farms. The suddenly just ran away from him, while he had taciturn, with vigorous changed stubborn after a long time a few words, “the boy”: “Could it happen that we crash, calls the boy […] We find it out, when the time comes, call Jens back the first contact, following the pattern: anxious question, reassuring answer, Icelandic dealing with each other in a nutshell “(page 219 et seq.

). Despite his exhaustion continues to drive “the boy” a little will to live, to find accommodation before night falls. Suddenly his coat a feeling that had been completely foreign to him, longing. He had known only sorrow: His family has died, an orphan since he was always just run away – “away from the fish, … away from the Heuarbeit, away from the continuous, grueling hardship of everyday life, …” (S .

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222).

For three weeks he lived in Geirþrúðurs house with Helga and the blind Captain Kolbeinn. For them, all the laws of life seem upside down: he was not cut out for the hard work, so they want to give him education. Most recently, he had read the grumpy old Kolbeinn very bumpy Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “Othello” in English. Soon he will be regularly informed. Expected to Helga, English at Hulda and Icelandic, history and literature at Gisli, the German Rectors”.

Against all reason and in disregard of the warnings of the few people who had offered them shelter and food, put Jens and “the boy” unswervingly continue their Höllentour. “The boy” rowing Jens suffering from water phobias, in a nutshell about the roaring, churning Fjord, saves his life, torments himself with him about two mountain plateau down to the godless glacier. You have almost fulfilled its mission to deliver the parcels because infected “the boy” in heavy snowfall found closer to death than to life. But Jens resurfaces, rips “the boy” of the dreams from sleep in down-soft embrace of death. Far away from the people, Jens found in these extreme situations to himself.

Finally, they reach in the desert a farmhouse where a father with his children and his servant lives. In the smokehouse for days is the late wife of the farmer in her coffin; to a burial at the cemetery on the other side of the mountain is out of the question, given the relentless winter storms. For weeks, not a soul had ventured into this area. So has “the Lord” have the farmers, the two men sent: The three of them can do it. “The boy,” Jens and the servant are on their way back out of the woods, they pull and push the coffin on a carriage to the cemetery, where the woman is to find their eternal rest.

Jón Kalman Stefánsson teaches readers in “the pain of angels” fearing, but also reverence and humility. To be inconceivable delivered such relentless forces of nature and to compete against them courageously. Week Long live the people that fate has thrown there without any contact with the outside world, prisoners in their Erdbehausungen that hardly represent under the snow. Hunger and disease determine their daily lives. Do they want to, they had never been born? Is it any wonder that the men addicted to alcohol, silenced or rape their women without rights? Every family, every yard strike terrible blows of fate: Men come in stormy seas on the fjords killed; others lost in the snow, hunger and freeze miserably; the most desperate plunge consciously into death, killed a fellow man or addicted to insanity.

Where some areas get almost never see the sun, where even during the short summer everything is in mist, since rise to different, delicate forms of poetry: Only people who – like Jens – prefer to wrap themselves in silence, no word speak too much listening, singing mountains, icicles laugh, roar of the sea.

Ironically, this stubborn loner sets of Author of “the boy” to the side that wants to love to entertain. How Stefánsson be closer to their long privation, always life-threatening march each carefully these two disparate characters, is a literary masterpiece. Jens Geirþrúður has indeed promised to pay attention to “the boys”, but he does his peculiar way: he ignores him, the wimp, which is to use with its eternal incomprehensible fascination with poetry to nothing, while his own brittle and hard shell has just opened just a crack, so that a little of the sensitive, responsible and conscientious core becomes visible. Meanwhile the boy deal to impress way existential philosophical thought – if he does not once again from the snow must dig out

What are words what they mean? Poetry can be fulfilled? Are we not yet Unhappiness damned? sings the songs that “the boy” against the will of his always progressing postman, the other, the dark thoughts can not drive. Death is omnipresent, he is waiting for each of us – and it is not better to die than to have to face every day the battle we still need to lose at the end. For his novel “The pain the angel “was the Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson by Per-Olov Enquist prize.