Jón Kalman Stefánsson: “My Yellow Submarine”, a great novel from Iceland

A boy grieving over his mother, Iceland’s rugged nature, the Beatles and Paul Mc-Cartney: for Jón Kalman Stefánsson it’s always a matter of life and death.

January 11, 2025 at 2:44 p.mUlm

An article by

Jürgen Kanold

The Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson

© Einar Falur Ingólfsson 2017 / Piper Verlag

He actually wants to approach the old Beatle with an important issue, but it’s so complex that he hasn’t been able to untangle it yet. That’s why he waits: “Some matters require a long preparation, they contain different things, events, memories, forgetting and stories in which miracles and everyday life, ridiculousness and sadness, joy and death mix and side by side.” This is exactly what Stefánsson’s is wonderfully about poetic and philosophical novel. It’s about a person who wants to come to terms with life.

A lot is happening. God and the narrator’s father force Johnny Cash to sing a terrible shanty, the dead mistake Ringo Starr for a Bishop of Hólar, and Sehnsucht is the highest mountain in Iceland and asks “where a novel about Keflavík is about love and a pile of clothes .”, where driving instructor Benjamin’s heart cracks”. And so on. The most incredible stories. Anyone who reads Stefánsson is dealing with magical realism. With the archaic Icelandic landscape, with existential experiences and a great, typically Icelandic love of storytelling, with melancholy and deadly sad moods – and in this novel also with an astonishing sense of humor.

Please buckle up tight!

Already on the first two pages, the narrator summarizes the legendary content of the book – and it could be the 61-year-old Stefánsson himself who does this, because it is also a novel about a person who tells how he became a writer becomes. The trigger warning to the reader: “I think that’s why you can fasten your seatbelt now, because anything can happen here.” Especially what we don’t understand.” This novel is an adventure, with many laconic, wise sentences.

Stefánsson takes readers to different places and times. But the story begins in the late 1960s in the Icelandic capital Reykjavík, where the narrator grows up. The mother dies, the father (who drives a Trabbi) is an alcoholic and is completely overwhelmed by his suffering and the child. The boy reads the Bible, but all he finds is an irascible God, who didn’t do any better with his son, Jesus, who abandoned him just as the drinking father abandoned the narrator.

At the end of 1969, “Yellow Submarine” was one of the six-year-old’s favorite songs. His mother tried to teach him the Beatles song on the harmonica. And had explained to him the text, which is about the friendly desire for safe protection in life. “But then my mother died and disappeared into the darkness.” Disappeared into the silence in which she became a speechless longing, the highest mountain in Iceland.” Just a few months later, as is well known, the Beatles broke up in an argument, “the world began to fall apart and humanity to be lost.” Stefánsson rarely does it underneath, it’s always about everything: existential. But the narrator already admits: “I may be exaggerating a little.” But perhaps not.

It’s incredibly touching how the boy talks about his grief. At first he thought that his mother was angry because he didn’t die with her. Then I realized that she could no longer speak. Anyone who dies loses their voice; the dead are completely helpless and therefore completely dependent on the living. Which is why he now reads the right books, “those that are smarter than all people”. This is how a poet grows up.