My Yellow Submarine - by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Jón Kalman Stefánsson's most personal novel to date. Spanning several timelines and disparate locations, My Yellow Submarine is a portrait of an Icelandic writer as a young boy and an unpredictable joyride in which the incredible and the mundane, tragedy and comedy, and joy and death, walk arm in arm. You might want to fasten your seatbelt.

August 2022. In a London park, a middle-aged writer from Iceland sits a short distance from Paul McCartney. The writer has important business with the former Beatle, but has trouble putting it into words, so he waits, trying to get it right - and while waiting, his past flows through him.

A mother plays 'Yellow Submarine' on the harmonica to her seven-year-old son. She dies and leaves a void. A few months later, The Beatles split up. Another great loss in the boy's life. A distant father doesn't make things easier. Only when the boy starts borrowing books from the library does he understand the direction his life should take.

An unexpected, often surreal bildungsroman, My Yellow Submarine is a masterful and life-affirming novel about a young boy in the 1970s and '80s Iceland, linked with the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Beatles, and the Old Testament, as he attempts to make sense of his mother's death.

Review Quotes

Praise for Jón Kalman Stefánsson

"Stefansson's narrative voice is the book's most striking quality. It has something in common with the 'slow prose' of Jon Fosse: run-on sentences, rich in repeated motifs, that tap into different layers of thought. A typical line in Philip Roughton's translation is flexible and supple, telescoping from close-up to wider view . . . Once the reader is settled into the rhythms of Stefansson's prose, we'll go anywhere with him."
--John Self, New York Times

"A perfect little novel . . . enthralling, seductive . . . Heaven and Hell embraces and defies the categories of story--adventure, historical, romance, ghost, metaphysical."
--Joy Williams, Book Post

"Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mr. Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere . . . Questioning, vulnerable and openly sentimental, [Your Absence is Darkness] is an absorbing commemoration of what the author calls the paradox that rules our existence, the vivifying joy and paralyzing sorrow of loving another person."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefánsson's book, nor the uniqueness of his prose, rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton."
--Daniel Mason, New York Times

"Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he's not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

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. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.