“Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night” by Jon Kalman Stefánsson (Iceland)

One of Nicola’s 100 Best Books for Inspiration in the 21^st century!

Book Club Favourite of Season 22

Review

Readers loved this book, describing it as light, uplifting, gentle and philosophical. They loved the small world of the village with its little details, its simmering sexual undertones, the delicate balance between life and death, and the villagers’ search for meaning in their humdrum routines. Readers warmed to the various characters, and liked the different moods they each gave off. They found it easy to empathize with what was going on in their lives, and felt there was a lovely mix of happy, sad and tragic in it all. Although they thought the style of writing was dense to start with, as they got into the story, they felt that it flowed well and had a light quality to it resembling stream of consciousness. Readers also liked the use of the first-person plural narrative at different moments which they felt resembled a Greek chorus, giving them commentary from the collective voice of the villagers. Overall, it averaged a 9.4 out of 10, a very high score to start off the season!

Synopsis

Sometimes a distance from the world’s tumult opens our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars.

The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. With humour, with poetry, and with a tenderness for human weaknesses, Stefánsson explores the question of why we live at all.

Favourite Quote

We speak, we write, we tell about big things and small to try to understand, try to grasp something, even the essence itself, which is, however, constantly moving away, like a rainbow. Old stories say that man cannot behold the face of God, that doing so would destroy him; and without doubt, it’s the same for what we seek — the search itself is our purpose; the result will deprive us of it. And of course it’s the search that teaches us the words to use to describe the splendour of the stars, the silence of the fish, a smile and sadness, the end of the world and summer’s light.

Nicola’s Book Club reading list

Season 22 – “Connection” (Dec 2021 – Apr 2022)
“Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night” by Jon Kalman Stefánsson (Iceland) *
“Stay With Me” by Ayobami Adebayo (Nigeria)
“Before the Coffee gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Japan)
“Holiday Heart” by Margarita Garcia Robayo (Colombia)

* The book club favourite
In italics, Nicola’s Coup de Cœur